"Stael" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... origin of society Society in Paris in the 17th Century Marquise de Rambouillet Her salons Mademoiselle de Scuderi Early days of Madame Recamier Her marriage Her remarkable beauty and grace Her salons Her popularity Courted by Napoleon Loss of property Friendship with Madame de Stael Incurs the hatred of Napoleon Friendship with Ballanche Madame Recamier in Italy Return to Paris Duke of Montmorency Seclusion of Madame Recamier Her intimate friends Friendship with Chateaubriand His gifts and high social ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... latter, his daughter tells us repeatedly, without any consciousness that she is recording a most ignominious trait, that public approbation was the very breath of his nostrils, the thing for which he lived, the thing without which he was wretched.—See vol. i. of Madame de Stael's Considerations. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... from the Iliad. That is to say, he was separated from it about three thousand years. This is a trifle too severe, for when twenty-one years of age he met the daughter of Necker at Paris—she who was to give the world of society a thrill as Madame de Stael. And if the gossips are right it was not the fault of Pitt that a love-match did not follow. But the woman gauged the man, and she saw that love to him would be merely an incident, not a consuming passion, and she was not the woman to write ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... Progress of Skepticism: Montesquieu, Voltaire. —3. French Literature during the Revolution: D'Holbach, D'Alembert, Diderot, J. J. Rousseau, Buffon, Beaumarchais, St. Pierre, and others. —4. French Literature under the Empire: Madame de Stael, Chateaubriand, Royer-Collard, Ronald, De Maistre.—5. French Literature from the Age of the Restoration to the Present Time. History: Thierry, Sismondi, Thiers, Mignet, Martin, Michelet, and others. Poetry and the Drama; Rise of the Romantic School: Beranger, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and others; ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Curchod's happiness."[146] Mademoiselle Curchod a few years later married Necker, a rich Paris banker, who under Louis XVI held the office of director-general of the finances. She was the mother of Madame de Stael, was a leader of the literary society in Paris and, despite the troublous times, must have led a happy life. One delightful aspect of the story is the warm friendship that existed between Madame Necker and Edward Gibbon. This began less than a year ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... Stael is reported to have said that Coleridge was "rich in a monologue, but poor in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... Boisseuil is a remarkable trait. Madame de Stael has alluded to it in her best style. 'In France,' she says, 'we constantly see persons of distinguished rank, who, when accused of an improper action, will say—"It may have been wrong, but no one will dare assert it to my face!" Such an expression is an evident proof of confirmed ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... distinctly a tete-a-tete talker, as Mr. Benson, the present-day essayist, in some of his intimate discourses, proclaims himself to be. But Burke and Browning, the best conversationalists in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, like all the famous women of the French salon, from Mme. Roland to Mme. de Stael, kept pace with any number of interlocutors on any number of subjects, from the most abstruse science to the lightest jeu d'esprit. Good talk between two is no doubt a duet of exquisite sympathy; but ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... Madame de Stael's words show much insight when she says that only the people who can play with children are able to educate them. For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... liberty, and the perpetuity of a free constitution, rest on the virtue and intelligence of the community which enjoys it. How is that virtue to be inspired, and how is that intelligence to be communicated? Bonaparte once asked Madame de Stael in what manner he could best promote the happiness of France. Her reply is full of political wisdom. She said, "Instruct the mothers of the French people." Mothers are, indeed, the affectionate and effective teachers of the human race. The ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... has been written on Venice, from Schiller and Radcliffe to Madame de Stael and Madame Dudevant! and yet we hardly know if any one, with the exception of the last, has more completely imbued his mind with the peculiar spirit of Venice, or reflected its impressions with more truth than Mr Whyte. Schiller, indeed, and Mrs Radcliffe, had never witnessed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... have been reading the life of Madame de Stael and 'Corinne.' I have felt an intense sympathy with many parts of that book, with many parts of her character. But in America feelings vehement and absorbing like hers become still more deep, morbid, and impassioned by the constant habits of self-government which the rigid forms of our society ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... together, especially in the library of a man who reads his books and puts them up again wherever there is room. Now here is a charming party: "A Treatise on the Steam-Engine" between "Locke on Christianity" and Madame de Stael's "Corinne." I wonder what they talk about at night when we are all asleep. Here is another happy juxtaposition: old Clarendon next to a modern metaphysician whom he would positively loathe. Here is Sadler next to Malthus, and Horsley next to Priestley; but this sort ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... were pleased to entitle 'a parish.' Ah" (continued the German with much bonhomie), "it was a pity to see in a great nation so much value attached to such a trifle as money. But what surprised me greatly was the tone of your poetry. Madame de Stael, who knew perhaps as much of England as she did of Germany, tells us that its chief character is the chivalresque; and, excepting only Scott, who, by the way, is not English, I did not find one chivalrous poet ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... one in my hand, I find the most cruel difficulty in laying it down before I reach the last page. That, however, does not answer in my case; and since the time when through the reading of Madame De Stael's Corinne, two dinners, one great wash, and seventeen lesser domestic affairs all came to a stand-still, and my domestic peace nearly suffered shipwreck, I have made a resolution to give up all novel-reading, at least for the present. But still it is so necessary for me to have some literary ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... They make friends for us; they are more potent than eloquence or genius without them." They add to beauty, they detract from personal ugliness, they cast a glamour over defects, in short, they work the miracle of mind over matter exemplified in the case of the extremely plain Madame de Stael, who was reputed to "talk herself beautiful in ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... reputations at the height of their rank and their positions, often produced in her presence the seductive idea of the lover; they cast into her soul certain ardent talk of love, the "mot d'enigme" which life propounds to woman, the grand passion, as Madame de Stael called it,—preaching by example. When the countess asked naively, in a small and select circle of these friends, what difference there was between a lover and a husband, all those who wished evil to Felix took care to reply in a ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... her first publication—now, perhaps, too much forgotten. To explain by what net-work of circumstances the masculine incarnation of a young girl was brought about, why Felicite des Touches became a man and an author, and why, more fortunate than Madame de Stael, she kept her freedom and was thus more excusable for her celebrity, would be to satisfy many curiosities and do justice to one of those abnormal beings who rise in humanity like monuments, and whose fame is promoted by its rarity,—for in twenty centuries we can count, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... Madame de Stael has truly observed, that love occupies the whole life of a woman. It is not therefore surprising that women should be more skilful in detecting the symptoms of it in others. Mrs McElvina, with the usual penetration ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Ward. Although second-rate as regards productive power, Amiel's mind was of no inferior quality, and his journal gained a sympathy which the author had failed to obtain in his life. In addition to the Journal, he produced several volumes of poetry and wrote studies on Erasmus, Madame de Stael and other writers. He died in Geneva on the 11th of March 1881. His chief poetical works are Grains de mil, Il penseroso, Part du reve, Les Etrangeres, Charles le Temeraire, Romancero historique, Jour ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Stael by the shoulders—that's not very polite towards a lady. These hints are invaluable; ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... to more modern times, Madame de Stael had a dish of very unique pattern, and, when driven by the command of Napoleon from her beloved Paris, she carried her chafing-dish with her into exile as one of her most cherished household gods. At the present ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill
... conqueror of Gaul might establish a throne upon the ruins of public liberty, he would have instantly repelled the unjust insinuation. Yet Greece fell; Caesar passed the Rubicon, and the patriotic arm even of Brutus could not preserve the liberties of his devoted country! The celebrated Madame de Stael, in her last and perhaps her best work, has said, that in the very year, almost the very month, when the president of the Directory declared that monarchy would never more show its frightful head in France, Bonaparte, with ...
— Henry Clay's Remarks in House and Senate • Henry Clay
... needs all the best intellect that it can get. We have many evil influences acting upon our society here, and we need the all-controlling influence of woman. We cannot fix a standard for her. History shows what she has done, in a Vespasia, Vittoria Colonna, De Stael, Bremer, Evans, Somerville and Maria Mitchell. She does not go out of her sphere when she is so highly educated. She can darn her stockings just as well if she does know the word in half-a-dozen languages. There is no longer novelty in this movement; it has been ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... romantic which excludes Scott? Indeed, M. Brunetiere himself is respectful to the traditional meaning of the word. "Numerous definitions," he says, "have been given of Romanticism, and still others are continually being offered; and all, or almost all of them, contain a part of the truth. Mme. de Stael was right when she asserted in her 'Allemagne' that Paganism and Christianity, the North and the South, antiquity and the Middle Ages, having divided between them the history of literature, Romanticism in consequence, in ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... rhetoric for those who need them most. Men are wonderfully imitative in killing themselves. Once the practice is come in vogue, it becomes a rage, an epidemic. Atheism and Materialism form the best nidus for the contagion of suicide. It is a shrewd remark of Madame de Stael: "Though there are crimes of a darker hue than suicide, yet there is none other by which man seems so entirely to renounce the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... from Rajpootana, the diamonds and jaspers from the Punjab, the carnelians and agates from Tibet, the corals from Arabia, the sapphires and other precious stones from Ceylon, and the genius that combined them all came from Heaven. Madame de Stael never saw this gem of India, and yet she said that architecture was frozen music. Emerson would have called it a blossoming ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... the infusion of party spirit.' Gibbon died in London almost at the very moment that De Maistre arrived at Lausanne, but his account of things remained true, and political feuds continued to run as high as ever. Among the people with whom De Maistre was thrown was Madame de Stael. 'As we had not been to the same school,' he says, 'either in theology or in politics, we had some scenes enough to make one die of laughter; still without quarrelling. Her father, who was then alive, was the friend and relative of people that I love with all my heart, and that ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... BENJAMIN DE, a French politician, of liberal constitutional principles, born at Lausanne, of Huguenot parents; settled in Paris at the commencement of the Revolution, where he distinguished himself by his political writings and speeches; was expelled from France in 1802, along with Mme. de Stael, for denouncing the military ascendency of Napoleon; lived for a time at Weimar in the society of Goethe and Schiller; translated Schiller's "Wallenstein"; returned to France in 1814; declared for the Bourbons, and pled in favour of constitutional liberty; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... explosion would follow. After the Revolution, during the First Empire, so called,—the usurpation, that is, of Napoleon Bonaparte,—literature was well-nigh extinguished in France. The names, however, then surpassingly brilliant, of Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, belong ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... Great Ghost is melting into thin air. Thousands of people have lost all belief in his existence. They use his name, and take it in vain; for when questioned, they merely stand up for "a sort of a something." The fear of God, so to speak, has survived his personality; just as Madame de Stael said she did not believe in ghosts, but she was afraid of them. Mrs. Browning gives voice to this sentiment ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... Josephine, who is living very happily, amusing herself with her gardens and her shrubberies.' This ci-devant Empress and Kennedy and Co., the seedsmen, are in partnership, says Miss Edgeworth. And then among the lists of all the grand people Maria meets in London in 1813 (Madame de Stael is mentioned as expected), she gives an interesting account of an actual visitor, Peggy Langan, who was grand-daughter to Thady in CASTLE RACKRENT. Peggy went to England with Mrs. Beddoes, and was for thirty years in the service ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... of this opinion, which we know is opposed to the popular feeling of many in the present day, we venture to quote what Miss Porter herself repeats, as said to her by Madame de Stael: "She frequently praised my revered mother for the retired manner in which she maintained her little domestic establishment, yielding her daughters to society, but not to the world." We pray those we love, to mark the delicate and most ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Mary Wortley. We have not as yet much female poetry; but there is a truly feminine tenderness, purity, and elegance in the Psyche of Mrs. Tighe, and in some of the smaller pieces of Lady Craven. On some of the works of Madame de Stael—her Corinne especially—there is a still deeper stamp of the genius of her sex. Her pictures of its boundless devotedness—its depth and capacity of suffering—its high aspirations—its painful ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... saw a reaction from this criticism, indicated by the praise of Madame de Stael (De la Litterature, 1804), by Guizot's essay accompanying a revision of Le Tourneur's translation (1821), and later in the appreciation of Mezieres's Shakespeare ses [OE]uvres et ses Critiques (1860), in several ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... may hide A Stael before whose mannish pride Our frailer sex shall tremble; Perchance this audience anserine May hiss (O fluttering Muse of mine!)— May ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... no inferiority. Our best novelists in point of composition, and of the management of detail, have mostly been women; and there is not in all modern literature a more eloquent vehicle of thought than the style of Madame de Stael, nor, as a specimen of purely artistic excellence, anything superior to the prose of Madame Sand, whose style acts upon the nervous system like a symphony of Haydn or Mozart. High originality of conception ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... Madame de Stael described it as "frozen music;" and a cathedral is a glorious specimen of "thought in stone," whose very windows are transparent walls of ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... not a man, but a system,' once said, in her most impressive tones, Madame de Stael to Sir James Mackintosh, across a dinner-table. 'Magnificent!' murmured Sir James. 'But what does she mean?' whispered one of those helplessly commonplace creatures who, like the present writer, go about spoiling everything. 'Mass! ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... there were two Priscillas. There was the Priscilla that her neighbors knew, the Priscilla that went to church, the Priscilla that taught Primary School No. 3. There was the other Priscilla, that read Chaucer and Shakespeare, Moliere and De Stael. With this Priscilla New Geneva had nothing to do. And it was the doubleness of her ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... because the glamour of Napoleon's life reduced to silence the lives of his contemporaries. He asserts that in the future, Bolvar will take his place beside the French Emperor. Napoleon owes his glory to Chateaubriand, to Lamartine, to Madame de Stael, to Byron, to Victor Hugo, while Bolvar has had few biographers, and a very few have spoken of him with the power and authority of those who praised or ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... every inquiry with a survey of the facts, and also that the "woman question" was the first to awaken her interest. Her greatest contribution to the advancement of women was herself; that is, her own achievements. To the same purpose were her biographies of famous women: "Memoirs of Mme. de Stael and Mme. Roland" in 1847, and sketches of "Good Wives" in 1871. Whittier says, she always believed in woman's right to the ballot, as certainly he did, calling it "the greatest social reform of the age." In one letter to Senator Sumner, she directly argues the question: "I reduce the ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... mistake not, Madame de Stael, in her Revolution Francaise, had this performance of Schiller's in her eye. Her work is constructed on a similar though a rather looser plan of arrangement: the execution of it bears the same relation to that of Schiller; it is less irregular; more ambitious ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... general, had some of the great qualities of Napoleon, but he also resembled him occasionally in a singular lack of delicacy and good taste. We do not, however, find that he ever showed such mean malignity as the French general did when persecuting Madame de Stael, because in her Germany she had omitted to mention his campaigns ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... Greek classics. Herodotus and Homer win, with their "vowelled" Greek, his warmest enthusiasm; whole nights of fever are devoted to them; disturbing dreams of an [179] Odyssey of his own come to him. "He felt in himself," says Madame de Stael, "an ardent attraction towards the south. In German imaginations even now traces are often to be found of that love of the sun, that weariness of the North (cette fatigue du nord), which carried the ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... ones, likely to distract his thoughts. 'Tell Mr. Bentham that Mr. Richard Lovell Edgeworth desires to see him.' 'Tell Mr. Richard Lovell Edgeworth that Mr. Bentham does not desire to see him' was the reply. When Mme. de Stael came to England, she said to Dumont: 'Tell Bentham I shall see nobody till I have seen him.' 'I am sorry for it,' said Bentham, 'for then she will never see anybody.' And he summed up his opinion of ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... their social offences because they are literary men. It is necessary for the world's sake, as well as for their own sake, that literary men and artists should take care to "provide against the evil day" like other people. "Imagination and art," says Madame de Stael, "have need to look after their own comfort and happiness in this world." The world ought to help them generously; all good men ought to help them; but what is better than all, they ought ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... the French Revolution. When Bonaparte wished to silence Madame de Stael, he said, "What does that woman want? Does she want the money the government owes to her father?" When Madame de Stael heard of it, she said, "The question is not what I want, but what I think." Henceforth women, like men, are to say what they think. ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... much of the clear perception, the scholarly and philosophic tone and decided judgment, which, supplemented by his picturesque description, full of life and color, have given character to his histories. They are features which might well have served to extend the remark of Madame de Stael that a great historian is almost a statesman. I can speak also from my own observation of the reputation which Motley left in the Austrian capital. Notwithstanding the decision with which, under the direction of Mr. Seward, he had addressed the minister of foreign affairs, Count Mensdorff, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... several of the Crugers, Colonel Duer, General Knox, Mayor Duane, Melancthon Smith, Mr. Watts, Yates, Lansing, and a half-dozen lesser lights. Mrs. Croix sat in the middle of the room, and her chair being somewhat higher and more elaborate than its companions, suggested a throne: Madame de Stael set the fashion in many affectations which were not long travelling to America. In the house, Mrs. Croix discarded the hoopskirt, and the classic folds of her soft muslin gown revealed a figure as superb in contour as it was ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... and "Edie Ochiltree," Wordsworth and John Bunyan, Plutarch and Winkelman, the Coleridges, Samuel, Sara, Hartley, Derwent, and Henry Nelson, Sir Egerton Bridges, Victor Cousin and "the Doctor," George Moir and Madame de Stael, Dr. Fracastorius and Professor Keble, Martinus Scriblerus and Sir Thomas Browne, Macaulay and the Bishop of Cloyne, Collins and Gray and Sir James Mackintosh, Hazlitt and John Ruskin, Shakspeare and ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... France. But the many causes we have noted above made the enterprise a difficult one, and the various divergences of society, politically speaking, rendered the task of the mistress of a house one of surpassing arduousness. Mme. de Stael, who, by her very superiority perhaps,—certainly by her vehemence,—was prevented from ever being a perfect example of what was necessary in this respect, acquired the nickname of Presidente de Salons; and it would appear, that, with her resolute air, her loud voice, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... the alembic of His mind they came out with new meaning. His originality consisted in His discriminating appropriation of His inheritance, and in His using it so that it became alive with new power. Madame de Stael said that Rousseau "invented nothing, but set everything on fire." Jesus took the religion of Israel, and lived its life with God, and after Him it possessed a kindling flame it had never shown before. The faith of a small people in a corner of the Roman Empire, with a few thousands of proselytes ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... kind did;" that they should "devote themselves to falsifying nature, refining and subtilizing sentiment, and modifying psychology after their own fancy," like Bulwer and Dickens, as well as like Rousseau and Madame de Stael, not to mention Balzac, the worst of all that sort at his worst. This was the natural course of the disease; but it really seems as if it were their criticism that was to blame for the rest: not, indeed, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Stael speaks the same language as the lady just cited, with more enthusiasm. Her eulogium on Rousseau was accidentally put into my hands, and her sentiments, the sentiments of too many of my sex, may serve as ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... ease and finish, without misplacing a word or dropping a sentence, and I realized at last that I was in the presence of a great writer. Not a great talker. It is clear that George Eliot never was that. Impossible for her to "talk" her books, or evolve her books from conversation, like Madame de Stael. She was too self-conscious, too desperately reflective, too rich in second-thoughts for that. But in tete-a-tete, and with time to choose her words, she could—in monologue, with just enough stimulus ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a subject, but a master. The general told them to let him in. As he passed, a voice called out, "There goes Cromwell." Lafayette stood still and answered, "Cromwell would not have come alone." Madame de Stael watched him as he entered the royal presence. His countenance, she says, was calm. Nobody ever saw it otherwise. Lewis received him with a sensation of relief, for he felt that he was safe. At that moment the sovereign indeed had perished, ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... have formed what may be called a professional estimate of women. When the demonstrative Madame de Stael asked him—evidently expecting him to pay her a compliment—'Whom do you think the greatest woman dead or alive?' Napoleon replied, 'Her, Madame, WHO HAS BORNE MOST SONS.' Nettled by this sarcastic reply, she returned to the charge, observing, 'It is said ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... somebody said about something else one time — if we hadn't had it, you know, it would have been necessary to invent it, though for the life of me, I can't remember who it was or what he said about it. Although likely it was Madame de Stael. We took her up once and it developed that she had said a most surprising number of things like that things, you know, that would be quite quotable if you could ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... "Madame de Stael was right when she said that 'nevermore' was the saddest and most expressive word in the English tongue" (so harsh to her ears, usually). "I think she called it the sweetest, too, in sound; but to me it is simply the most sorrowful, a knell of doom, and it fills ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... History,' 'Formative Influences,' 'Madame de Stael,' 'Israel among the Nations,' 'Old-age Pensions,' appeared originally in the American Review, the Forum—the first under the title of 'The Art of Writing History'; 'Ireland in the Light of History,' in the North American Review. Those ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Scott, Lord Cornwallis, Dr. Wistar, Bishop Soule John Bright, Jenny Lind Goldsmidt, and Dr. Gall are good representatives of this temperament. Fig. 86 is an excellent illustration of it, finely blended and well balanced, in the person of Madame de Stael. This temperament requires fewer tonics and stimulants than the lymphatic. This constitution is best able to restore vital losses. It is a vital temperament, in other words, it combines favorably with all the others, and better adapts ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... worth mentioning. Madame Lacene, one of the most brilliant women of France, died a few years ago at Lyons in her 104th year. Her will was under contest on account of her extreme age, but the court was fully satisfied of her intellectual competence. In the olden time she had often entertained Mme. de Stael, Mme. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... sighed and mourned for a time, but soon found occupation congenial to their nature in the little departments of life—dressing crape; reviving black silk; converting narrow hems into broad hems; and in short, who so busy, who so important, as the ladies of Glenfern? As Madame de Stael, or de Something says, "they fulfilled their destinies." Their walk lay amongst threads and pickles; their sphere extended from the garret to the pantry; and often as they sought to diverge from it, their instinct always led them to return to it, as the tract in ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... look for in the natives of the forest. The General received them with the dignified affability which was the distinctive characteristic of his manner under all circumstances; and although there was nothing in the occasion to justify it, I could not help recalling Madame de Stael's comment upon his appearance at Versailles, on the fearful fifth of October:—"M. de la Fayette was perfectly calm; nobody ever saw him otherwise." Withdrawing with them into an inner room, he did ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... salons and action determined. Chief of the hostesses was Madame[173] Necker: at her crowded receptions might be seen Abbe Sieyes, the architect of Constitutions; Condorcet, the philosopher; Talleyrand, the patriotic bishop; Madame de Stael, with her strong, coarse face and masculine voice and gestures. More intimate were the Tuesday suppers at which a dozen chosen guests held earnest communion. Madame de Beauharnais was noted for her excellent table, and her Tuesday ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... situation as absolute sovereign. He studied the laws of etiquette as closely as he studied the condition of his troops. He saw that the men of the old regime were more conversant in the art of flattery, more eager than the new men. As Madame de Stael says: "Whenever a gentleman of the old court recalled the ancient etiquette, suggested an additional bow, a certain way at knocking at the door of an ante-chamber, a ceremonious method of presenting a despatch, of folding ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... seems lifted from what was growing obscure in our knowledge of social life in the youth of our fathers. Our only wish, in reading, is for more of it. But the life gathers interest as it proceeds. From America it extends to Europe, and we meet the names of Humboldt, De Stael, Allston, Vanderlyn, Mrs. Siddons, as among his associates even in early youth. So through Home Again and in Europe Again there is a constant succession of personal experience and wide opportunity to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... apparent importance, as a matter of state policy that Napoleon should possess an heir. She also was fully aware that throughout France marriage had long been regarded but as a partnership of convenience, to be formed and sundered almost at pleasure. "Marriage," said Madame de Stael, has become but the sacrament of adultery." The nation, under the influence of these views, would condemn her for selfishly refusing assent to an arrangement apparently essential to the repose of France and of Europe Never was a woman placed in a situation ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... can be considered. Many who would amply repay a careful study have simply been glanced at, and others have been omitted altogether. As it would be out of the question in a few pages to make an adequate portrait of women who occupy so conspicuous a place in history as Mme. De Maintenon and Mme. De Stael, the former has been reluctantly passed with a simple allusion, and the latter outlined in a brief resume not at all proportional to the relative interest ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... Montague and Mrs. Thrale. Yet she was forced to own that she had never heard conversation before. The most animated eloquence, the keenest observation, the most sparkling wit, the most courtly grace, were united to charm her. For Madame de Stael was there, and M. de Talleyrand. There, too, was M. de Narbonne, a noble representative of French aristocracy; and with M. de Narbonne was his friend and follower General D'Arblay, an honorable and amiable man, with a handsome person, frank soldier-like manners, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... case he found, perhaps, less declension from the standard of the giants of whom he had been an eager student in his early manhood, when he read "all Balzac," and recorded his admiration for the "dignity" of Mme. de Stael's Germany. Dumas he loved then and always, returning to him with ever new delight, and utilizing the rare periods of inaction imposed upon him at intervals by illness to read the whole of The Three Musketeers series 'through again—properly.' Where other ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... may perhaps have accused her of ambition; and yet she loved him; but love is not always absolute devotion and self-abnegation; love is not always a virtue; it is often the result of egotism; it is, as Madame de Stael says, one personality in two persons, or a mere double personality. Frances loved the prince royal, but not the less had she been dazzled by ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... be true. But Argemone did not remark the stammering: the new thoughts startled and pained her; but there was a daring grace about them. She tried, as women will, to answer him with arguments, and failed, as women will fail. She was accustomed to lay down the law a la Madame de Stael, to savants and non-savants and be heard with reverence, as a woman should be. But poor truth-seeking Lancelot did not see what sex had to do with logic; he flew at her as if she had been a very barrister, and hunted her ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... these, I fancy, must have sympathized with Madame de Stael's consumptive niece, who answered to the question, "Why she was weeping all alone?" "Je me regrette." When, resting in their daily walk, shortened till it became a toil to reach the shady seat under the elms at the garden's end, ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... of Madame de Stael, who personally knew much of General Lafayette, [Footnote: She was also an intimate friend of Madame de Lafayette. They were accused, in the days of suspicion and terror, of being too much engaged in political affairs.] and who was well acquainted with characters and events connected ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... Mme. de Maintenons, four Mme. de la Vallieres, and three Catherines of Russia." Good God! Has our "best society" come to such a pass that its proudest ladies delight to personate notorious prostitutes?" There was no Racine or Moliere, no Charlotte Corday or Mme. de Stael"—the men posed as profligate kings, the women as courtesans! Yet in that same city young Mr. Seeley is arrested for looking at a naked dancing-girl, and "Little Egypt" has to "cut it" when she hears the cops! And what is the difference, pray, between a Pompadour and a Five ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... families of Grandson, Lesdiguieres, and Dohna successively held the barony; and in later times the title de Coppet hid a name more widely known, for on the Chalet of Les Biolles, some distance to the east of La Baronne, the name of Auguste de Stael de Holstein de Coppet is carved, after the fashion of Swiss chalets. This was Madame de Stael's son, who built Biolles in 1817; it was afterwards sold to the commune of Nyon, and finally purchased by Arzier two or ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... at Ferney, and Madame de Stael at Coppet. Let the patriarch come first. Voltaire was sixty years of age when he settled on the shores of the lake, where he was to remain for another four-and-twenty years; and he did not go there ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... to learned things. Fritz, paraphrasing Tacitus, vented his hatred of the Latin civilisations. Alice agreed with him and quoted Mme. de Stael. Niebeldingk arose, quietly meeting the reproachful ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... pains. They have only to show themselves, to receive the attention and applause that a man of genius must work a lifetime to earn. Their world is at their feet. Wealth, power, gratified vanity, are theirs without an effort. Madame de Stael said she would willingly give all her fame for one season of the reign of a youthful beauty. She, it is true, was a woman; but David Hume, a keen observer, and moderate in his statements, noticed that even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... he who introduced distinguished guests who spoke at the opera house on Decoration Day. He called Mrs. Keller "Mother," and he wasn't above noticing the fit of a gown on a pretty feminine figure. He thought Ivy was an expurgated edition of Lillian Russell, Madame De Stael, and Mrs. Pankburst. ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... been brought about by certain essays in the Morning Post, and there is certainly no reason to believe that a tyrant whose animosity against literary or quasi-literary assailants ranged from Madame de Stael down to the bookseller Palm would have regarded a man of Coleridge's reputation in letters as beneath the stoop of ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... affairs in the French papers: you gave them the taste for interesting themselves in the concerns of foreign countries. Few of us before steam had shortened distance really knew England. Voltaire had by turns glorified and ridiculed it; De Stael had shown it to us in an agreeable book; the witty letters of Duvergier de Hauranne had revealed the secrets of its electoral system. Your correspondence of 1841 completed the work." He might pertinently have added, "Because you are about the only ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... De Stael— Leman![75] these names are worthy of thy shore, Thy shore of names like these! wert thou no more, Their memory thy remembrance would recall: To them thy banks were lovely as to all, But they have made them lovelier, for the lore Of mighty ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... frequently: he was superb! He had a sort of liking for me, and never attacked me, at least to my face, and he did every body else—high names, and wits, and orators, some of them poets also. I have seen him cut up Whitbread, quiz Madame de Stael, annihilate Colman, and do little less by some others (whose names, as friends, I set not down) of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the same time, though she died long before him, Mme. de Stael, by her curious and interesting, though never affecting, novels, Delphine and Corinne, by her dissertations on various serious subjects, by her work on Germany, which initiated the French into the habits and literature of neighbours they were ill acquainted with, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... each he made remonstrances, and applied reproaches. La Motte and Madame Dacier, the opposite leaders, were convinced by his arguments, made reciprocal concessions, and concluded a peace. The treaty was formally ratified at a dinner, given on the occasion by a Madame De Stael, who represented "Neutrality." Libations were poured to the memory of old Homer, and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... woman of her day, Madame Recamier is widely known; as the friend of Chateaubriand and De Stael, she is scarcely less so. An historic as well as literary interest is attached to her name; for she lived throughout the most momentous and exciting period of modern times. Her relations with influential and illustrious men of successive revolutions were intimate and confidential; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... fail, you will be sneered down till you become embittered, soured, misanthropic; a curse to yourself, a burden to the friends who sympathize with your blasted hopes. Edna, you have talent, you write well, you are conscientious; but you are not De Stael, or Hannah More, or Charlotte Bronte, or Elizabeth Browning; and I shudder when I think of the disappointment that may overtake all your eager aspirations. If I could be always near you, I should indulge less apprehension for your future; for I believe that I could help you ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... limits of a duodecimo page did not forbid my reproducing here, in all their glory, the unique head-lines which precede the article in question. Any pageant introduced by music is impressive, says Madame de Stael. At least she says something of that sort, only it is in French, and I can not remember it exactly. And so any newspaper article is startling when introduced by the braying of head-lines. Fonts of type for displayed ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... therefore read masterpieces only; "after Milton, then Shakspeare; then Ossian; then Junius; Paine's 'Common Sense;' Swift's 'Tale of a Tub;' 'Joan of Arc;' Schiller's 'Robbers;' Burger's 'Lenora;' Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall;' and long afterward, Tasso, Dante, De Stael, Schlegel, Hazlitt, and the 'Westminster Review.'" Reading of this character might have been expected to lead to something; and was well calculated to make an extraordinary impression on such a mind as Elliott's; and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... Revolution of 1830, the glory of George Sand was reflected on Le Berry, many a town envied La Chatre the privilege of having given birth to this rival of Madame de Stael and Camille Maupin, and were ready to do homage to minor feminine talent. Thus there arose in France a vast number of tenth Muses, young girls or young wives tempted from a silent life by the bait of glory. ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... are much attached to our ideas, we endeavor to attach everything to them," says Madame de Stael. "The secret of writing well," observes a Scotch professor, "is to write from a full mind." These two maxims seem to us to illustrate the whole subject of historical composition; an earnest votary thereof ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... Then Washington needed him, first in England, afterward as minister to France; and when Monroe relieved him in 1794 he travelled leisurely through Europe for four years, meeting its distinguished writers and statesmen, forming friendships with Madame De Stael and the Neckers, aiding and witnessing the release of Lafayette from Olmutz prison, and finally assisting the young and melancholy, but gentle and unassuming Duke of Orleans, afterward King of France, to find a temporary asylum in the United States. He returned to America ten ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Humboldt there;" whereupon he first perceiving her, stood amazed, and at length exclaimed, "Valgame Dios! who is that girl?" Afterwards he was constantly with her, and more captivated, it is said, by her wit than by her beauty, considering her a sort of western Madame de Stael; all which leads me to suspect that the grave traveller was considerably under the influence of her fascinations, and that neither mines nor mountains, geography nor geology, petrified shells nor alpenkalkstein, had ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... finite power. It is enough if it unfold and discipline, and guide genius in its mission to the world. We are not to demand that it shall make of every man a Newton, a Milton, a Hall, a Chalmers, a Mason, a Washington; or of every woman a Sappho, a De Stael, a ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... his swallow-tailed coat to pick out a thought there. You know the story Walter Scott tells about the head boy? He always fumbled over a particular button when he recited; so, one day, the button being furtively removed by Walter, the boy became abstracted, and Scott passed above him. Madame De Stael, as she talked, twisted a bit of paper, or rolled a leaf between her fingers. (Some have attributed this to her vanity, as she had very beautiful hands.) I believe friends came to note her necessity, ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... the majority became identified with that necessity which knows no law, contributed further to educate his sense of right in politics, and to augment the distrust of power natural to a pupil of the great Whigs, of Burke, of Montesquieu, of Madame de Stael. On the other hand, as a pupil of Doellinger, his religious faith was deeper than could be touched by the recognition of facts, of which too many were notorious to make it even good policy to deny the rest; and he demanded with passion that history should set the follies ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... however, this knowledge of how and when to digress, and not easy to be learnt. Gerard de St. Amand died of grief in his middle age because Louis XIV. could not bear his reading of a poem on the Moon, in which he praised the King for his skill in swimming. On the other hand Madame de Stael obtained almost all the material for her literary work by a consummate skill in directing the digressions of conversation. Upon whatever subject her pen was engaged, that was the theme to which she led ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... given in "Lettres tres sur l'Angleterre par A. de Stael Holstein." "King George III. once gave directions for closing up a gate and a road in his own park at Richmond, which had been free to foot passengers for many years. A citizen of Richmond, who found the road convenient to the inhabitants of that village, took up the cause of his neighbours. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... we have. Before Smollett and his almost contemporary travel correspondent, Samuel Sharp, it would probably be hard to find any mention of the cicisbeo in England, though the word was consecrated by Sheridan a few years later. Most of the "classic" accounts of the usage such as those by Mme. de Stael, Stendhal, Parini, Byron and his biographers date from very much later, when the institution was long past its prime if not actually moribund. Now Smollett saw it at the very height of its perfection and at a time when our decorous protestant curiosity ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... deserts of life, friendless and forsaken. Long ago we of America heard the deep yearnings of the souls of women in foreign lands for freedom responsive to our own. Mary Wollstonecraft, Madame de Stael, Madam Roland, George Sand, Frederica Bremer, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Frances Wright and George Eliot alike have pictured the wrongs of woman in poetry and prose. Though divided by vast mountain ranges, oceans and plains, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... works of George Sand will, in spite of all its vagaries, still be recognized. And more than this, since the period of sentimentalism will be seen as more extensive, and as the works of Richardson, Rousseau (of course only those which belong in this category), and of Madame de Stael and others, will be included in it, then we say that the better productions of our authoress will carry off the prize from all ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... citizen or other person was taken from the protection of our national flag without any form of trial whatever." So insolent and oppressive had British aggression become before the war of 1812, that Mr. Jefferson in his somewhat celebrated letter to Madame de Stael-Holstein of May 24, 1813, said, "No American could safely cross the ocean or venture to pass by sea from one to another of our own ports. It is not long since they impressed at sea two nephews of General Washington returning from Europe, and put them, as common seamen, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... adhere to his revolutionary ideas. After the 10th of August, 1792, he withdrew to Switzerland, at Coppet, near his friend Madame de Stael. Under the Empire he held himself apart. He had become as conservative as he had been liberal, as religious as he had been Voltairian. Under the Restoration, he was one of the most convinced supporters of the throne and the altar. ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... charmed by these qualities is drawn towards the possessor; it desires union with that treasury of virtues and becomes devoted to it. The fruits of this love are expansion of the heart, self-forgetfulness, self-denial. This is true love. Shakespeare, Valmiki, Madame de Stael, are its poets; as Kalidas, Byron, Jayadeva are of the other species of love. The effect on the heart produced by the sight of beauty is dulled by repetition. But love caused by the good qualities of a person does not lose its charm, because beauty has but one appearance, ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... finer joy coming to a man than, as his hair whitens, to have a daughter who understands him at his best, who enters into his life, sympathizes with his ideals, ministers to his mental needs, who is his companion and friend. Only a great man ever has such a daughter. Madame De Stael, who delighted in being called "the daughter of Necker," was such a woman, and the splendor of her mind was no less her father's glory than was the fact that he was the greatest ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... truest friend of Henry IV., Geneva honored as if her own son. Voltaire so loved Geneva that there he had a residence as well as at Ferney, and sang with enthusiasm of blue Lake Leman, "Mon lac est le premier." Madame de Stael was born of Swiss parents in Paris, but her childhood and many of her mature years were spent in charming Coppet, where the waters of the lake lave the shores within the boundary of the Canton of Geneva. Sismondi was a native of Geneva, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... successfully to maintain themselves. We now and here declare the inhumanity, cruelty, and outrage of that father and mother, who pass their daughters into womanhood, having given them no facility for earning their livelihood. Madame de Stael said: "It is not these writings that I am proud of, but the fact that I have facility in ten occupations, in any one of which ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... under Napoleon she seems never to have got her bearings. She roamed to Switzerland twice, and painted some two hundred pastel landscapes of its scenery. It was during her first visit thereto that she met and painted Madame de Stael as "Corinne." ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... robbers were strangers—if strangers, why not foreigners?—if foreigners, who so likely as the French? Signor Brunoni spoke broken English like a Frenchman; and, though he wore a turban like a Turk, Mrs Forrester had seen a print of Madame de Stael with a turban on, and another of Mr Denon in just such a dress as that in which the conjuror had made his appearance, showing clearly that the French, as well as the Turks, wore turbans. There could ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Madame de Stael did a world of work in her time; and one day, while she was seated amid instruments of music, all of which she had mastered, and amid manuscript books which she had written, some one said to her: "How do you find time to attend to all these things?" ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... pas moi qui romprait la premiere l'union sacree de nos coeurs; vous le savez bien que ce n'est pas moi, et je rougirais presque, d'assurer ce qui n'est que trop certain.—Corinne, par MADAME DE STAEL. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 363, Saturday, March 28, 1829 • Various
... doctrine puts him necessarily on his guard against appearances, sustains his apprehension under perplexity, and prepares him for recognising anywhere what he knows to be everywhere." 100 There is a popular saying of Madame de Stael, that we forgive whatever we really understand. The paradox has been judiciously pruned by her descendant, the Duke de Broglie, in the words: "Beware of too much explaining, lest we end by too much excusing." 101 History, says Froude, does teach that ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... front gate, duster in hand (she never conversed quite as well without it, and never did anything else with it), might have been a humble American descendant of Madame de Stael talking on the terrace at Coppet, with the famous sprig of olive in her fingers. She moved among her subjects like a barouche among express wagons, was heard after them as a song after sermons. That she did not fulfil the whole duty of ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... vague, the indefinite, in a beyond which was called the ideal, in an aspiration towards the infinite, incapable of fruition and therefore melancholy.... To Voltaire and Rousseau succeeded Chateaubriand, De Stael, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Lamennais. And in 1815 appeared the Sacred Hymns of the ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... not so difficult to understand why, when he was detected, he persisted in the falsehood. For what it really is, it must be partially praised; and it will remain not only as a literary curiosity, but as a work of unequal but real merit. It was greatly admired by Napoleon and Madame de Stael, and, in endeavoring to consign it to oblivion, the critics are greatly ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... people where they had it at table, at dinner and supper parties, and in drawing-rooms. The French, especially the French ladies, were brilliant conversationalists. They held "salons" in which the conversation was wonderful—Mme. de Stael and Mme. Roland, for instance; and in England, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Sydney Smith, and Horace Walpole, and surely Miss Fanny Burney, and no doubt L. E. L., whose real name was Miss Letitia Elizabeth Landon— ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... were always very civil to me, though in general they disliked literary people, and persecuted and mystified Madame de Stael, Lewis, * * * *, and the like, damnably. They persuaded Madame de Stael that A * * had a hundred thousand a year, &c. &c., till she praised him to his face for his beauty! and made a set at him for * *, and a hundred fooleries besides. The truth is, that, though I gave up ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... passion, this time, at her cousins' unexpected attack; she was for putting her own hand to the work of drawing up the memorial of her husband and of her brother-in-law, the Count of Toulouse. "The greater part of the nights was employed at it," says Madame de Stael, at that time Mdlle. do Launay, a person of much wit, half lady's maid, half reader to the duchess. "The huge volumes, heaped up on her bed like mountains overwhelming her, caused her," she used to say, "to look, making due allowances, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... his jolly companions,—Brevoort, Kemble, Paulding, and the rest,—and sails for Bordeaux. He wanders through Southern Europe delightedly,—meets Washington Allston at Rome, and is half tempted to turn painter,—sees Humboldt, De Stael, Cooke, Siddons; and while all England is jubilant over Nelson's victory, and all England mourning over Nelson's death, he sails, in 1806, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... either, for that is the lasting plan after all. I have a curious Note, sent me for inspection the other day; it is addressed to a Scotch Mr. Erskine (famed among the saints here) by a Madame Necker, Madame de Stael's kinswoman, to whom he, the said Mr. Erskine, had lent your first Pamphlet at Geneva. She regards you with a certain love, yet a shuddering love. She says, "Cela sent l'Americain qui apres avoir abattu les forets a coup de hache, croit qu'on doit ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... too might say that 'we have not much in common,' if I were only to compare mind to mind, and, when my poor Carry says something less profound than Madame de Stael might have said, smile on her in contempt from the elevation of logic and Latin. Yet, when I remember all the little sorrows and joys that we have shared together, and feel how solitary I should have ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... prove it; Let free experience, education prove it! Why is it that the vilest drudgeries Are put on woman, if her sphere be that Of the affections only, the emotions? He represents the intellect, and she The affections only! Is it always so? Let Malibran, or Mary Somerville, De Stael, Browning, Stanton, Stowe, Bonheur, Stand forth as proof of that cool platitude. Use other arguments, if me you'd move. Besides, I see not that your system makes Any provision for that numerous class To whom the ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... Constant, whose book on the Hundred Days was just about to appear. Lucien scarcely caught a glimpse of fair hair, a refined oval-shaped face, keen eyes, and the pleasant-looking mouth belonging to the man who had played the part of a Potemkin to Mme. de Stael for twenty years, and now was at war with the Bourbons, as he had been at war with Napoleon. He was destined to win his cause and to die stricken ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... anything about his books. He doesn't like women to talk about books. He says they only pretend—even the clever ones. Except, of course, Madame de Stael. He can only say she was ugly, and I don't deny it. But I have about used up Madame de Stael,' she added, dropping into another sigh as soft ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... functions and all-night reading? Mme. du Deffand sees in Walpole her ideal, and she gives expression to her feelings, regardless of propriety; for she is childish and irresponsible. To a certain extent, the same was true of Mme. de Stael, but she was still physically healthy and young enough to enjoy life and the realization of that which she had so long desired—an ideal affection. In the case of Mme. du Deffand, the soul was willing, but the body failed. Her emotion can scarcely ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... the majority of later French critics, it expressed a sentiment born of the genius of the nation, and made an impression that was only gradually effaced. Marmontel, La Harpe, Marie-Joseph Chenier, and Chateaubriand, in his 'Essai sur Shakespeare,' 1801, inclined to Voltaire's view; but Madame de Stael wrote effectively on the other side in her 'De la Litterature, 1804 (i. caps. 13, 14, ii. 5.) 'At this day,' wrote Wordsworth in 1815, 'the French critics have abated nothing of their aversion to "this darling of our nation." "The English with their bouffon de ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... groups were Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, William Penn, Old General Jackson, John Jacob Astor, De Witt Clinton, and many of the old Knickerbocker residents of New York; with Sir Robert Peel, Lord Brougham, the Duke of Wellington, Hunt, Keats, Byron, Scott, Cowper, Hume, Goethe, De Stael, Mrs. Hemans, and ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... impression upon Europe. This pamphlet was generally regarded as a precursor of the memoirs which Napoleon was thought to be writing in his place of exile. The report soon spread that the work was conceived and executed by Madame de Stael. Madame de Stael, for her part, attributed it to Benjamin Constant, from whom she was at this time separated by some disagreement." Afterwards it came to be known that the author was the Marquis Lullin de Chateauvieux, a man in society, whom no one had suspected of being able ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... letters, of which two hundred and forty still remain. Indeed, his influence seemed to increase with his absence from the capital; and this his enemies beheld with the rage which Napoleon felt for Madame de Stael when he had banished her to within forty leagues of Paris. So a fresh order from the Government doomed him to a still more dreary solitude, on the utmost confines of the Roman Empire, on the coast of the Euxine, even the desert of Pityus. But his feeble body could not sustain the fatigues of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... Ofterdingen; he used Tieck's notes for this purpose. He wrote also a great number of letters, between 60 and 70 elaborate reviews, and some critical essays, the best of which seems to be his commentary to Madame de Stael's De l'Allemagne, while he translated from Anacreon, Dante, Guarini, Horace, Ovid, Petrarch, Vergil, and others, and left a number of fragments including the outline of a pretentious novel of which Heinrich von Veldeke, whom he looked upon as "der Heilige des Enthusiasmus," was to be the hero. ...
— Graf von Loeben and the Legend of Lorelei • Allen Wilson Porterfield
... have been immoral. Publicity to women is like handling to peaches—the bloom comes off, whether or not any other harm occurs. In literature, the great feminine figures, George Sand, Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Stael, George Eliot—all were banned and at least one—the first—was out of the pale. Creative thought has in it the germ of masculinity. Genius in a woman, as we usually describe genius, means masculinity, which, of all things, to real men is abhorrent in woman. True genius ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... broken in 1813 by a genial meeting in London with the ambitious Madame de Stael, and again with the vivacious little Irishwoman, Maria Edgeworth. She was keeping her promise of not writing more; but during a visit to Sir Walter in 1820 her imagination was touched by Scotch tales, and she published 'Metrical Legends' the following ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Madame de Stael's words show much insight when she says that only the people who can play with children are able to educate them. For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... true individuality, man and woman can meet without antagonism and opposition. The motto should not be forgive one another; it should be, understand one another. The oft-quoted sentence of Mme. de Stael: "To understand everything means to forgive everything," has never particularly appealed to me; it has the odor of the confessional; to forgive one's fellow being conveys the idea of pharisaical superiority. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... of refinement and bravery, had been one of the ornaments of the court of Versailles and of the Constituent Assembly. He had been a Knight of Honor of Madame Adelaide, the daughter of Louis XV.; Minister of War under Louis XVI., in 1792; a friend of Madame de Stael; an emigre in England, Switzerland, and Germany; and in 1809, thanks to Napoleon's good-will, he had once more resumed his military career, after an interruption of seventeen years. Towards the end of the campaign the Emperor had sent him as governor ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... Miss LOGAN at any time. Accordingly, our syren departed hungrily for the capital of the French. Her career in Paris is well known to every mere ordinary schoolboy: therefore, wherefore dwell? Madame DE STAEL'S dressmaker called on her. A committee of strong-minded milliners solicited the honor of her acquaintance. GEORGE FRANCIS TRAIN proposed an alliance with her for the purpose of hurling imperial jackassery from its tottering throne. Other ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 25, September 17, 1870 • Various
... success. The convention takes a guard of 554 life-guard men, and sixty of the artillery. The newspapers of Paris speak of the convention with great boldness. To quiet the people, it is given out that corn is coming in from all quarters. Admiral Renaudin receives orders to put to sea. Baron de Stael is sent as ambassador from the King of Sweden to engage in friendship and alliance with the convention. Rhull ventures to pronounce in the convention an eulogy on the old monarchy. The deficit in the last month amounts to 660,000,000 livres, ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz
... a sound instinct for her art, disfigured though her later writings are by what Madame de Stael called her triste utilite. Her first story is her most artistic production. Castle Rackrent is simply a pleasant satire upon the illiterate and improvident gentry who have always been too common in her country. In this book she holds no brief; she never stops to preach; ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... Nephew, afterwards Sir John Salusbury Life in Wales Character and Habits of Piozzi Brynbella Illness and Death of Piozzi Miss Thrale's Marriage The Conway Episode Anecdotes Celebration of her Eightieth Birthday Her Death and Will Madame D'Arblay's Parallel between Mrs. Piozzi and Madame de Stael Character of Mrs. Piozzi, ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... melody of the Italians or the rhetorical excesses of the French. The music of Beethoven was his ideal, and the dramas of Shakespeare, whose work, to his mind, compared with the early Greek plays, was like a scene in nature in comparison with a piece of architecture. Mme. de Stael called beautiful architecture "frozen music." It was just this architectural, frozen, congealed condition that Wagner wished to overcome, without running into any frivolities. He was in every sense a living, breathing man, and his ...
— Edward MacDowell • Elizabeth Fry Page
... again on the throne he should make a point of spending two hours a day in conversation with women, from whom there was much to be learnt. He had, no doubt, several types of women in mind, but it is more than probable that the banishment of Madame de Stael rose before him as one of the mistakes in his career. It was not that he showed lack of judgment merely by the persecution of a rare talent, but by failing to see that the rare talent was pointing out truths very valuable to his ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... well. I pride myself on some diplomatic experience. You have negotiated your coup in a manner worthy of a De Stael. You would adorn the service. I wonder if you realize the possibilities of your future in an international sphere. To you I have no ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... the bad old woman whose excess of iniquity was blazoned in her "bad black and white straw bonnet." This woman might have been an ASPASIA, a DE STAEL, a Mrs. SOMERVILLE,—nay, the SYBILLA CUMEA herself. What of that? The "bad" bonnet must sink the large souled Grecian to a cinder-wench, make the Frenchwoman a trapes from the Palais Royal, our fair astronomer a gipsy of Greenwich Park, and the fate-foretelling sybil a crone crawled from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... Foreign Correspondent of the Times Newspaper, and so adding to his income in the mean while. He left Llanblethian in May; dates from Dieppe the 27th of that month. He lived in occasional contact with Parisian notabilities (all of them except Madame de Stael forgotten now), all summer, diligently surveying his ground;—returned for his family, who were still in Wales but ready to move, in the beginning of August; took them immediately across with him; a house in the neighborhood of Paris, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... Monsieur Paulin Limayrac was chief pall-bearer, and demonstrated in the columns of "La Presse" that Madame Emile de Girardin had herself alone more genius than Sappho, Corinne, Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Stael, and Madame George Sand, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... proneness to frivolity and broad jest, its thirst for superficial excitement. Whatever his individual preferences, his mental organization is so large and happy, that he enjoys, and can do equal justice to, Father Lacordaire and M. Michelet, to Madame de Stael and M. Guizot, to Corneille and Goethe, to Fenelon and M. Renan, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert |
