Page:Madame de Staël (1887 Bella Duffy).djvu/79

Rh brilliant mind was attracted by the amazing spectacle then presented by the Convention. A Government which, deprived of organized armies, money, or traditions, confronted with a European coalition, and weighted with the responsibility of crime, had conquered its enemies in the field, and made its will respected from the Pyrenees to the Rhine, was exactly of a kind to fascinate a born combatant like Constant. He arrived eager to be initiated into that strange world; longing to find himself in the salons of Madame Tallien, Josephine Beauharnais, and Madame de Staël.

Hitherto his Egeria had been Madame de Charrière, a charming middle-aged monitress, Dutch by birth, but French by right of intellect and choice of language. Her delicate penetration and subtle sympathy with minor moods had doubtless for years responded precisely to his ideal; for if she might not excite, neither could she bore him; and she must have understood his fastidious notions even before he could express them. She was, in fact, perfection as long as he was still too young to mind feeling old; but there necessarily came a moment when that unconscious comedy was played out. The fitful energy of his nature had gradually vanquished his early lassitude, and he needed to renew his utterances at the founts of some Sybilline inspiration.

Madame de Staël appears simply to have overwhelmed him; and the effect which he produced on her was not less startling. Her salon was the rallying-ground of contradictory individualities. She believed in those days that she could reconcile Irreconcilables, and she welcomed Conventionnels liked Chénier and Roederer, stranded "survivals" of a vanished epoch