Every one ran to the new-comer, gathered from him whatever he knew, and then returned to his own circle, where the reports were eagerly discussed. By tacit agreement, each lady, who, as we have said, was admitted to the salon by reason of her wit or beauty, held a little court of her own in the reception-room of the Hôtel de Suède; so on this particular evening there was, besides Madame de Staël, Madame de Krüdener and Madame Récamier. Madame de Krüdener was three years younger than Madame de Staël. She was a Courlandaise, born at Riga, the daughter of a rich landowner, Baron de Witinghof. She married Baron de Krüdener at the age of fourteen, and accompanied him to Copenhagen and Venice, where he filled the rôle of Russian ambassador. Separated from her husband in 1791, she had regained the liberty which had been for a time curtailed by her marriage. She was very charming and very witty, speaking and writing French extremely well. The only thing with which she could have been reproached in that exceedingly unsentimental age, was a strong tendency to solitude and revery. Her melancholy, which was born of the North, and which made her look like a heroine of a Scandinavian saga, lent her a peculiar character in the midst of her surroundings, which tended toward mysticism. Her friends were sometimes angered by a sort of ecstasy which occasionally seized upon her in the midst of a brilliant gathering. But when they drew near her in her inspired moments, and saw her beautiful eyes raised to heaven, they forgot Saint Thérèse in Madame de Krüdener, and the woman of the world in the inspired being. But it was common belief that those beautiful eyes, so often raised to heaven, would deign to regard things earthly the moment that the singer Garat entered the room where she was. A romance which she was then writing, entitled "Valérie, or the Letters of Gustave de Linard to Ernest de G.," was nothing more than the history of their love. She was a woman of twenty-five or six, with that light hair peculiar to northern latitudes. In her moments of ecstasy her face assumed a marble-like rigidity of expression, and her skin, as white as satin, gave an appearance of truth to the illusion. Her friends, and she had many, although she had as yet no disciples, said that in her moments of lofty abstraction, and communion with supernatural beings, disconnected words escaped her, which nevertheless, like the Pythonesses of ancient times, had a meaning of their own. In short, Madame de Krüdener was a forerunner of modern spiritualism. In our day she would have been called a "medium." The word not being invented at that time, the world contented itself with calling her inspired.