Page:Madame de Staël (1887 Bella Duffy).djvu/75

Rh dangers, invariably proved irresistible to her. Nevertheless she was quick to perceive and to signalize the folly of the reactionaries; and she felt but scant sympathy with the mad attempt at a monarchical restoration known in history as the 13th Vendémiaire. She uttered no word of palliation for the massacres committed by the Royalists in Lyons and Marseilles, and she was more than willing to admit the benefits conferred on France by the first six months of the Government of the Directory.

But she could not be happy at the continued exclusion of the nobles and clericals; and any appeal from one of them touched her with all the force of old association. Talleyrand had not returned from America when her eloquence induced Chénier to address the Convention in favour of his recall. Montesquion next claimed her attention; and in consequence of all this she became an object of suspicion and was accused of exciting revolt. The Government, indeed, thought her so dangerous that, at one moment, when she was at Coppet, they ordered her to be arrested and brought to Paris, there to be imprisoned. Barras, however, defended her, as she relates, "with warmth and generosity," and, thanks to him, she was enabled to return, a free agent, to France.

Throughout the events preceding the coup d'Etat of the 18th Fructidor, Madame de Staël was keenly alive to the danger which threatened and eventually overtook her friends among the Moderates. To act, in these circumstances, was with her a second nature. Her relations with Barras had naturally become very friendly; and she used her influence to obtain the nomination of Talleyrand to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. "His nomination was the only part