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152 her work, Considerations, of which the first two parts alone were eventually revised by herself.

In July, from Coppet, she wrote a characteristic letter to Madame Récamier, telling what difficulty she experienced in keeping up the fine love of solitude, which had beguiled her momentarily into seeking that picturesque and sacred but monotonous retreat. "My soul is not sufficiently rural," she writes. "I regret your little apartment and our quarrels and conversations, and all that life which is yours." In this sturdy love of streets, Madame de Staël resembled Dr Johnson and, perhaps, if the truth were known, she resembled all good talkers.

She returned to Paris in the winter of 1814-15, and, conscious that her strength was failing, she became extremely anxious to marry her darling daughter to some man who would be worthy of her. Her circumstances had been recently much improved by the repayment, from the Treasury, of the two millions which Necker had left there. Such wealth, joined to her own brilliant social position, entitled her to look out for a good parti for Albertine; but she was resolute that the match should be a happy one. Her ideal of felicity was conjugal love. She preached, indeed, a code of wifely submission that would seem very insipid to some emancipated damsels in our days, and was perhaps a little too perfect to be possible. But she put into it all her own rare faith in good, and often laughingly declared that "she would force her daughter to make a marriage of the heart."

In the midst of these amiable preoccupations, and while enjoying once again the delight of social intercourse, unhampered by foreign modes of speech and thought, and untroubled by the irritation of exile,