Page:Madame de Staël (1887 Bella Duffy).djvu/150

140 and the Imperial family. Of the Czar she speaks with a fervent admiration that later generations have not shared. He had the facile amiability and conventional philanthropy of a sovereign who finds his benevolent theories so constantly crossed by circumstances as to release him, in most instances, from the responsibility of applying them. But any promise of political reform and any appeal to general principles of excellence, found so ready a response in Madame de Staël's own heart that, especially where a monarch spoke, she ceased to be severely critical.

According to Galiffe, she met in Russia with immense social success, and enchanted everybody. He, personally, found her much improved since the days of her brilliant, but too self-asserting youth.

Stein was struck with her air of simplicity and goodness, and sought to convey her great unaffectedness of manner by saying that "she gave herself no trouble to please"—quite a man's judgment on a woman, and curiously inaccurate as a necessary consequence. Madame de Staël was so intensely interested in every new person who appeared to her at all distinguished, that she must always have cared supremely to please. But what Stein probably meant was that she had none of the airs and graces of worldly coquettes; and very often, when launched in conversation, she must have been more bent on convincing than seducing.

Madame de Staël passes over in her Memoirs a scene at the theatre, during her visit to St. Petersburg, which wounded her deeply, and is related by Arndt. She went with her son and somebody else to the "Théatre Français," to see Racine's Phèdre. Scarcely was she seated, when somebody in the pit