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46 that Madame de Staël, always preoccupied with her subject and never with herself, irritated the nerves and stirred the bile of inferior people who were proportionately gratified to hear her attacked; and that she lived in the midst of a society where conjugal fidelity was rare enough to be hardly believed in. Countless passages in her writings prove how exalted was her ideal of family life; and if they also prove her constant, restless yearning after some unattained, unattainable good, there is at least no sign of the satiety of exhausted emotion in them. Let us be content, then, that in many instances a veil should hide from us the deeper recesses of Madame de Staël's heart. Grant that there were two Germaines—one her father's daughter, lofty-minded, pure, catching the infection of exalted feelings, and incapable of error; the other her husband's wife, thrust into the fiery circle of human passion, thence to emerge a little scorched and harmed. The hidden centre of that dual self cannot be revealed to us; but what we do know is sometimes so grand and always so great that we can afford to be indulgent when reduced to conjecture.

In 1791, after having paid a visit of condolence to her father at Coppet, Madame de Staël had returned to Paris, and made her salon the rallying-point for the most distinguished Constitutionels. Conspicuous among these, in principles although not in name, was De Narbonne, described by Madame de Staël herself as "Grand seigneur, homme d'esprit, courtisan et philosophe." He was a brilliant, an enlightened, a generous, and charming man. His sympathies liberal; it would have been too much to expect  him that they should be subversive. He brought up in the enervating atmosphere of