Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/798

 788 Reviews of Books and ingenuous pictures of contemporary life. It is a cause for regret tliat the work is not complete, the editor, Madame Wimpffen, having found herself obliged for various reasons to give a selection merely of what seemed to her the most important letters, and it is a distinct dimi- nution of their value that, although written originally in German, they are offered to the public in a French translation, the accuracy of which the reader has no means of controlling. In the year 1796 Friiulein Reimarus, the daughter of a celebrated Hamburg physician, married Charles-Frederic Reinhard, diplomatic representative in her native city of the new French republic. It is to be observed that Reinhard was himself a German, having been born in the year 1761 in the duchy of Wiirttemberg. He is thus to be reckoned among that considerable band of his countrymen who, either for political or for personal reasons, expatriated themselves to seek their fortunes be- yond the Rhine. Difficult as it is for a person living one hundred years after to believe, Reinhard, while becoming an excellent Frenchman whose loyalty was never iijuestioned — he was rewarded toward the end of his life with a French peerage — remained always in the most intimate relations with literary and scientific Germany. He was a man with two loyalties, a loyalty of soul and a loyalty of hand and service, and he seems never to have felt or at least to have admitted their incompatibility. The statement holds also for his wife, who, although writing in German to a German mother established in Germany, and linked in her inner life almost exclusively with Germans, does not yield in clamorous French patriotism to any subject of Napoleon regularly baptized with water of the Seine. This national dualism, emblem and expression of the time when united France was the greatest political power of Europe, and di- vided Germany respectable merely as a great cultural power, gives the letters a psychological background that affects in a very complicated way the material presented by the writer and constantly renews the reader's interest. To give an example : Both Madame Reinhard and her husband entered in the year i So 7 into very intimate relations with Goethe, for whom ever afterward they entertained the most profound admiration ; yet the overthrow of Prussia, completed in this same year, and involving the overthrow of all Germany, arouses in the fair correspondent the most ardent expressions of satisfaction. I have said that one's pleasure in this volume lies chiefly in the illu- minating glimpses which we get of contemporary actors and contemporary manners. Napoleon, Goethe, the king of Saxony, Talleyrand, are rapidly drawn as they appeared at the moment of transit across the writer's vision, and the sketch has a palpability and picturesqueness that makes the object glow with more vitality than if it had been honored with a laborious essay. I do not think that the unsympathetic quality which made Madame de Stael so great a bore even to her admirers, has ever been more clearly or more maliciously illustrated than in the descriptions on page 99 and page 409. The glimpse of Napoleon racing sullenly through the famous gallery of Dresden (p. 340) is irresistibly funny, and