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Rh her wishes, and in great part under her eyes. She died on 6th May 1794. M. Necker felt her death acutely, and for months not even his daughter's sympathy could console him. Madame Necker had one of those selftormenting natures which poison the existence of others in embittering their own. Too noble to be slighted, and too exacting to be appeased, they work out the doom of unachieved desires; and when they go to be wrapt in eternal mystery, their parting gift to their loved ones is a vague remorse and doubting. Silent themselves when they might have spoken, they leave an unanswered question in the hearts of their survivors. Monsieur Necker, with his exaggerated consciousness, must have asked himself repeatedly if he had cared for his strange and loving wife enough. Madame de Staël mourned her mother sincerely, but it is clear that the keenest edge of her grief came from contemplation of her father's.

Three months had not elapsed after Madame Necker's death when the 9th Thermidor dawned, and at its close, all sanguinary as that appalling termination was, France drew one long sigh of inconceivable relief, for Robespierre had fallen. The Directory followed, and Baron de Staël having been re-nominated to his post, his wife lost no time in hurrying back to Paris. There, true to her indefatigable self, she immediately set about obtaining the eradication of her friends' names from the list of the proscribed émigrés. From this moment her opinions, and with them her character, underwent a certain change. She had been a moderate royalist; she became avowedly a republican. But her republicanism was of a strangely abstract and eclectic sort, and it was dashed with so many personal leanings towards