When she was forty-five years old, she made a second marriage, with a young French officer, Rocca by name, twenty-two years her junior. Strange as it may seem, this was a true love-match, and the two, notwithstanding the disparity of age, lived together in great devotion and happiness until her death. The marriage was secret, and was known to but few persons in the life-time of Madame De Staël. Of three children, offspring of the first marriage, one was killed in a duel while the mother lived, and the others survived her and did her honor. A son was also born from the second marriage. What eventful years were those for France in which this woman lived. If one with such a theme as our author can not make an interesting story, the fault surely is not with his subject-matter. Madame De Staël saw her father, whom she idolized, the idol of the French people; she saw him—and it was a proud time in her life—after the jealousy of rival ministers had brought about his retirement from the office of finance minister, recalled by the king, and welcomed back to his old position by such demonstrations of popular homage and devotion as have been accorded to but few; and later she saw him again seeking the retirement of his Swiss home execrated by the same fickle populace of France. She saw the downfall of Louis XVI. and deplored this ill-starred monarch’s fate, whose head was one of the trophies of the guillotine. She saw the First Revolution with its horrors, and ardent champion as she was for human freedom and popular rights, her heart was sickened at the spectacle. She saw the hero of Corsica arise from nothingness to be the terror of all Europe; the strides of his ambition she witnessed until he stood the first monarch of the world, with crowns in his hands as baubles to give away. She saw his “vaulting ambition o’erleap itself” at last, and the tide of his fortunes reversed; the exile of Elba and that of St. Helena passed before her view, and while she rejoiced to see Napoleon crushed, she sorrowed as a true French woman over the humiliation of France. She saw another Louis upon the French throne, and was his trusted adviser and friend. Napoleon she hated with all her soul. Acknowledging his consummate military genius, she loathed him as a monster of selfishness—a tyrant whose god was self. The emperor feared her pen in the cause of popular freedom, and after trying in vain to gain her support he showed in various ways his malice toward her. He banished her from France at length, and the story of her years of exile—bravely borne with all its hardships, though she could have escaped it by writing in praise of Napoleon—is very affecting. Dr. Stevens uses as the appropriate motto of his book the saying of Lamartine: “This woman was the last of the Romans under this Cæsar, who dared not destroy her, and could not abase her.”