Page:Madame de Staël (1887 Bella Duffy).djvu/124

114 Madame de Staël records such facts as the following:—"It was painful to him to be old. His figure, which had grown very stout and made movement irksome to him, gave him a feeling of shyness that prevented his going into society. He hardly ever got into a carriage when anybody was looking at him, and he did not walk where he could be seen. In a word, his imagination loved grace and youth, and he would say to me sometimes, 'I do not know why I am humiliated by the infirmities of age, but I feel that it is so.' And it was thanks to this sentiment that he was loved like a young man."

For the rest, the sketch is one long impassioned elegy in prose. One is astonished at the sudden creative force of expression in it. It is graphic by mere power of words without any help from metaphor.

It was not in Madame de Staël's nature to mourn in solitude, and we have Bonstetten's authority for the fact that the summer of 1804 was one of the most delightful which he had ever passed at the Château. Schlegel, Constant, Sismondi, were all there, as well as Bonstetten, himself, and Madame Necker de Saussure, now more than ever devoted to her cousin. Madame de Staël had also a new visitor, Müller the historian, whose learning was stupendous, and who wrangled from morning till night on subjects of amazing erudition with Schlegel. The mistress of the house, although far from being the equal of the two combatants in learning, sometimes rushed between them with her fiery eloquence, like an angel with a flaming sword; but most of the society were reduced to silence. Sismondi felt a perfect ignoramus, and talked plaintively to Bonstetten of going to Germany, there to drink in facts and theories at the source of the new