"Madame de Stael" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and Bourrienne, and political women like Madame de Remusat and Madame de Stael, all of whom were brought under the Emperor's displeasure by their zealous aptitude in one way and another for intrigue, disloyalty, and, so far as the men are concerned, glaring dishonesty in money ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... truth is that Stendhal was in some ways a generation behind his time, and often has an odd, old-fashioned flavor suggestive of Marivaux and Crebillon fils. On the other hand, his psychologic tendency is distinctly modern, and not at all to the taste of an age which found Chateaubriand or Madame de Stael eminently satisfactory. But he appeals strongly to the speculating, self-questioning spirit of the present day, and Zola and Bourget in turn have been glad to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... by the understanding, the heart being 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 ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... support 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 true distinction, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... remarks 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 ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... 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 ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... to attempt her. She never looked twice the same. In feature she was commonplace, her form lacked the classic touch, and her raiment was as plain as the plumage of a brown thrush in an autumn hedgerow. She was as homely as George Eliot, Mary Wollstonecraft, Rosa Bonheur, George Sand, or Madame De Stael. No two of the women named looked alike, but I once saw a composite photograph of their portraits and the picture sent no thrills along my keel. Their splendor was a matter of spirit. Have you ever seen the Duse?—there is but ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... her 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 woman did not occur to her fascinated constituents. ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... picture of laziness. Monkeys rest only during sleep. Old age does not affect their nimbleness; they can be fattened, for I have seen baboons as sleek as seals, but, like Gibbon, Henry Buckle, and Marshal Vendome, they prove that the energy of a strong will can bear up under such burdens. Madame de Stael, too, managed to combine a progressive embonpoint with the undiminished brilliancy of her genius, though it is certain that adipose tissue does not feed the flame of every mind. Charles Dickens in his "American Notes" expresses the opinion that no vigor of mental ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... and Englishmen for the first time in their respective, and in a European light. Moreover, as one European critic has pointed out, it is also one of the first, and still one of the subtlest, studies in the psychology of sex and emancipation of woman of the nineteenth century. Madame de Stael's relations with the clever and ambitious young statesman and writer, Benjamin Constant, formed the chief source of her inspiration in writing "Corinne," as it formed his in writing "Adolphe." Madame de Stael died in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Ansard. (writes). Madame de Stael by the shoulders—that's not very polite towards a lady. These hints are invaluable; ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... 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 the scenes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... 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 ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... Irving. Conscript. By Erckmann-Chatrian. Conspiracy of Pontiac. By Francis Parkman, Jr. Conspirators. By Alexandre Dumas. Consuelo. By George Sand. Cook's Voyages. By Captain James Cook. Corinne. By Madame de Stael. Countess de Charney. By Alexandre Dumas. ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... 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 ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... When Madame de Stael published her celebrated novel of Delphine, she was supposed to have painted herself in the person of the heroine, and M. Talleyrand in that of an elderly lady, who is one of the principal characters. "They tell me," ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... dishonest or immoral; therefore, we must believe that the 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 be no doubt Signor Brunoni was a Frenchman—a French spy come to discover the ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... getting to be 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, in the pleasant village of Passy at ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... used to talk of his two bald authoresses, Mrs. Barbauld being one and Mrs. Inchbald being the other. Crabb Robinson and Rogers were two faithful links with the outer world. 'Crabb Robinson corresponds with Madame de Stael, is quite intimate,' she writes, 'has received I don't know how many letters,' she adds, not without some slight amusement. Miss Lucy Aikin tells a pretty story of Scott meeting Mrs. Barbauld at dinner, and telling her that it was to her that ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... and the vague humanities of Rousseau! When an era of military despotism supervened upon the reign of license, how destitute of lettered genius seemed the nation, except when the pensive enthusiasm of Chateaubriand breathed music from American wilds or a London garret, and Madame de Stael gave utterance to her eloquent philosophy in exile at Geneva! "Napoleon eut voulu faire manoeuvrer l'esprit humain comme il faisait manoeuvrer ses vieux bataillons." Yet more emphatic is the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of adventure that swept France along 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
... grandfather of Madame de Maintenon, and ancestor of Merle d'Aubigne, the 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 under the influence of Madame de Stael, and inspired ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... sensitiveness, and passion. But at twenty-five he was exercising a wonderful charm, and had already defined for himself his peculiar line of intellectual activity. He had an odd, attractive gift of conversation, or rather of monologue, as Madame de Stael observed of him, full of bizarreries, with the rapid alternations of a dream, and here or there an unexpected summons into a world [71] strange to the hearer, abounding in images drawn from a sort of divided imperfect life, the consciousness of the opium-eater, as of one to ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... de 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 occupied him to the exclusion of a ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... 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 ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... this once abode of Royalty, are most splendidly furnished, and decorated with valuable pictures. The likenesses of Madame de Stael, J.J. Rousseau, Cromwell, and Francis ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... the streets. 'Of 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 of Mrs. Haldimand we are told, ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... Scott. And the reason is not far to seek. The newcomers found England in possession of a native romanticism of a very robust type, by the side of which the imported article showed like a delicate exotic. Carlyle affirms that Madame de Stael's book was the precursor of whatever acquaintance with German literature exists in England. He himself worked valiantly to extend that acquaintance by his articles in the Edinburgh and Foreign Review, and by his translations from German romance. But he found ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... List;" the method of study therein indicated might be indefinitely extended, but the few works given form an almost necessary starting-point. A less restricted list would, of course, include the Semi-Historic examples of such Foreign authors as Madame de Stael, Balzac, Spielhagen, &c. The purport of this book being primarily in the direction of Historical Romance proper, I have confined my attention here to a few works on the borderland of my ...
— A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales • Jonathan Nield
... 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 ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Renaissance and of the classical age, it attracts into its orbit all the great works of contemporary intelligence." Quinet, pursuing a somewhat different line of thought, regards the worship of German ideas inaugurated in France by Madame de Stael as the natural result of reaction from the eighteenth century and all its ways. "German systems, German hypotheses, beliefs, and poetry, all were eagerly welcomed as a cure for hearts crushed by the mockery of Candide and the ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... encyclopaedic book on Madame de Stael she quotes approvingly Sainte-Beuve's phrase that "with Corinne Madame de Stael ascended the Capitol." I forget in which of his many dealings with an author who, as he remarks in the "Coppet-and-Weimar" causeries, was "an idol of his youth and one that he never renounced," ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... during five years' residence established his learning on a solid foundation; time was also found for the one love episode of his life—an amour with Suzanne Curchod, an accomplished young lady, who subsequently became the wife of the French minister M. Neckar, and mother of Madame de Stael; shortly after his return to England in 1758 he published in French an Essay on the Study of Literature, and for some time served in the militia; in 1774, having four years previously inherited his ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... [G] Madame de Stael is reported to have said that Coleridge was "rich in a monologue, but poor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... plea against 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 ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... the pay of France. Hormayr's Archives contain a pamphlet well worthy of perusal, in which an account is given of all the arrests and persecutions that took place on account of matters connected with the press.—Madame de Stael was exiled for having spoken favorably of the German character in her work "de l'Allemagne," and the work itself was suppressed; Napoleon, on giving these orders, merely said, "Ce ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... 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 ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... 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 ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... interesting record (R. 339) of his difficulties, in finding anything in print in the libraries of the time, about 1815, or any one who could tell him about the work of the German universities, which he, as a result of reading Madame de Stael's book on Germany, was desirous of ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... housed in golden cages with every want supplied, or wandering in the dreary 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 ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... the revolutionary general, who, whether he came to save or to destroy, was no longer 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, but ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... and the gayety, the spite, and the venturesomeness of Lady 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 irritability, ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... romantic, it is a convenient "exploding word," and in its general application signifies nothing more than "see how much finer I am than other people!"[1] but in literature and character I shall adhere to the definition of Madame de Stael, who uses the word vulgar as the reverse of poetical. Vulgarity (as I wish to apply the word) is the negative in all things. In literature, it is the total absence of elevation and depth in the ideas, and of elegance and ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... thinking Madame de Stael has asserted that "Hobbes was an Atheist and a Slave." Yet I still think that Hobbes believed, and proved, the necessary existence of a Deity, and that he loved freedom, as every sage desires it. It is now time to offer an apology for one of those great men who are the contemporaries ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... the cardinal points as her sole garment." "Vetu de climat," says Madame de Stael. In Paris nude statues are "draped in cerulean blue." Rabelais (iv.,29) robes King Shrovetide in grey and gold of a comical cut, nothing before, nothing behind, with sleeves ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... Miss Beaufort, as was her custom, retired for an hour to read in her dressing-room, before she directed her attention to the toilet. She opened a book, and ran over a few pages of Madame de Stael's Treatise on the Passions; but such reasoning was too abstract for her present frame of mind, and she laid ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... intermediate tegumentary coverings, made of thin rubber or gold-beater's skin, and so often relied upon as absolute preventives, Madame de Stael is reputed to have said, 'They are cobwebs for protection, and bulwarks against love.' Their employment certainly must produce a feeling of shame and disgust utterly destructive of the true delight of pure hearts and refined sensibilities. ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... 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
... is the chateau, formerly the property of M. Necker, and now the residence of his daughter, Madame de Stael, who will probably be as celebrated in future times for her writings, as her father for the administration of the French finances. I was to have accompanied two friends to a fete given here by Madame de Stael, but unfortunately ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... at this satisfactory conclusion, which must be as agreeable to you as it is to us, I shall close this long letter, merely observing, in apology, that as Madame de Stael said, in answer to the remark, that "Women have nothing to do with politics;"—"That may be, but when a woman's head is about to be cut off, it is natural she should ask—why?" so it appears to me, that when bullets ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... novel, which have not belied the success obtained by 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 ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... 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 for his pleasure. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... library, chooses rather to become familiar with the 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 northern peoples away into the countries of the South. A fine sky brings to birth sentiments not ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... solemn premeditation, which tends, as Madame de Stael says, to bring more poetry into life, some women, in whom virtuous mothers either from considerations of worldly advantage of duty or sentiment, or through sheer hypocrisy, have inculcated steadfast principles, take the overwhelming fancies by which ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... Lamartine, and Victor Hugo, a lyric sun, a philosophic poet, later, perhaps in consequence of the Revolution of 1830, becoming a "Symbolist." He has been held to occupy a middle ground between De Musset and Chenier, but he has also something suggestive of Madame de Stael, and, artistically, he has much in common with Chateaubriand, though he is more coldly impersonal and probably much more sincere in his philosophy. If Sainte-Beuve, however, calls the poet in his Nouveaux Lundis a "beautiful angel, who has been drinking vinegar," ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... to a woman, another to a man. To him, said Madame de Stael, it is an episode; to her, it is the whole history of life. A thousand distractions divert man. Fame, riches, power, pleasure, all struggle in his bosom to displace the sentiment of love. They are its rivals, not rarely its masters. But woman knows ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... season, and without a guide, we made up our minds to go in direct opposition to his counsels, and after gaining the summit, to descend by the other side, and sleep at Schmiedeberg, or some other town in Prussian Silesia. Just, albeit sharp and cutting, is the aphorism of Madame de Stael, that there is no country in the world where the expression, "It is impossible," comes so frequently into use as in Germany. Propose to a German any undertaking which he has either never tried, or which might break through his every-day habits, and he will assure you that the thing is ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... dignity which I had been taught to 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 his best, as he afterwards told me, to prevail upon them to return home, though not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... part of the printers and the 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 lines ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... His thought; but as He passed the old words through 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 ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... electrical rapidity; you were at once twenty and fifty years old for me. Away from you the different places, which I have inhabited are only the milestones of my life telling me of the distance I have come." With much more in the same strain. Of Madame de Stael Gibbon does not speak in very warm praise. Her mother, who was far from being contented with her, may perhaps have prejudiced him against her. In one letter to him she complains of her daughter's conduct in no measured ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... a 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 ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... of the Peace of Amiens had 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 ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... as is often stated, create the "woman of thirty," this characteristic type having already appeared in Madame de Stael's Delphine, in Benjamin Constant's Adolphe, and in Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir, he must be credited with having magnified her charms and presented her advantages and superiority to a much higher degree than had been done before. Women indeed play in general an important role in his work, ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... the merits of the rest of the company, who were only invited to tea. Four maiden ladies (who had pulled on blue stockings in order to hide the increasing thickness of their ankles, and considered Miss Hendy the legitimate successor of Madame de Stael, and Mr Pitskiver in Harley Street the beau-ideal of love in a cottage) relieved the monotony of a gentleman party by as profuse a display of female charms as low gowns and short sleeves would allow. And about six o'clock there was a highly interesting and superior party of eight, to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... certain affinities with more famous and fortunate authors of his own day,—Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael,—are everywhere visible in Senancour. But though, like these eminent personages, he may be called a sentimental writer, and though Obermann, a collection of letters from Switzerland treating almost entirely of nature ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... 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 and light as ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... subjoined to almost every page of the text are so ample and particular as to furnish in themselves extensive reading. The notices of every person named would go far to serve as a brief biographical dictionary of Byron's contemporaries, whether known or unknown to fame. We get a concise account of Madame de Stael—her birth, books, and political opinions—very useful to those who had no previous acquaintance with her. Lady Morgan and Joanna Southcote obtain quite as much space as would be allotted to them in any handbook of celebrities. Beau Brummell and Lord Castlereagh are ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Rousseau was to many as an inspired prophet. No woman's library was then considered complete which did not include Dr. Fordyce's Sermons and Dr. Gregory's "Legacy to His Daughters." Mrs. Piozzi and Madame de Stael were minor authorities, and Lord Chesterfield's Letters had their admirers and upholders. These writers Mary treats separately, after she has shown the result of the tacit teaching of men, taken collectively; and here what ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... courted by princes, bowed to with respect as she went past in her carriage, and might choose among the oldest names in France and Navarre. That world which would have cried Raca to us, on seeing two handsome creatures united and happy, always did honor to Madame de Stael, in spite of her 'romances in real life,' because she had two hundred thousand francs a year. The world, which grovels before money or glory, will not bow down before happiness or virtue—for I could have done good. Oh! how ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... realization of an exalted dream, he had neither the wit to trace a cause to its consequence, nor the common sense to rest when he had done enough. He had no mental perspective, nor sense of proportion, and in the words of Madame de Stael he 'mistook ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... works. Once more, that unfortunate editor is BOSSUT, not BOSSUET; and if it may appear to some that the difference of one letter in a name is not of much consequence, yet it is from an error as trifling as this that people of my acquaintance confound Madame de Stael with Madame de Staal-Delauney, in spite of chronology and common sense. Again, by the leave of the Christian Remembrancer (vol. xiii. no. 55.), the elegant and accomplished scholar to whom we owe the only complete text of Pascal's ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... 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, for the performance of this writer or that, for criticism can ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... greatest—intellectually greatest—women of modern times have lived in France and it is remarkable that they have been three of the most shamelessly profligate in all history. The worst of these, probably—Madame de Stael—left us no records of her long-continued, disgusting, and almost incredible licentiousness, so remarkable that Chateaubriand deemed her the most abandoned person in France at a period when modesty was ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • 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, no condescending ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... I was twenty, would have it that I was like Rousseau, and Madame de Stael used to say so too in 1813, and the 'Edinburgh Review' has something of the sort in its critique on the fourth canto of 'Childe Harold'. I can't see any point of resemblance:—he wrote prose, I verse: he was of the people; I of the aristocracy: he was a philosopher; I am none: he published ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... village police, to be passed to some mystic Mecca they 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 among ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... 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
... pleasure I have almost entirely renounced, because whenever I have a really interesting 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 ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... 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, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Grey.—"Madame de Stael was forcibly struck by the factitious tone of the best society in London, and wished very much to have an opportunity of judging of that of the second class. She, however, had not this opportunity, which I regret, as I think it would ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 560, August 4, 1832 • Various
... sadder than to see the young, or those in mature life, seeking, according to the current phrase, to find means of "killing time." But in extreme old age, when the power of work, the power of reading, the pleasures of society, have gone, this phrase acquires a new significance. As Madame de Stael has beautifully said, 'On depose fleur a fleur la couronne de la vie.' An apathy steals over every faculty, and rest—unbroken rest—becomes the chief desire. I remember a touching epitaph in a German churchyard: 'I will arise, O Christ, when ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... lucidity of a studied style. And so men came from Cosne, from la Charite, and from Nevers, on the right bank; from Lere, Vailly, Argent, Blancafort, and Aubigny, on the left bank, to be introduced to Madame de la Baudraye, as they used in Switzerland, to be introduced to Madame de Stael. Those who only once heard the round of tunes emitted by this musical snuff-box went away amazed, and told such wonders of Dinah as made all the women jealous for ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... have acquired with so much labor, and, seeking in his living dramas only the application of the principles with which they are familiar, scruple not to condemn the immortal works of the greatest of all uninspired writers. Madame de Stael truly says: 'Those who believe themselves qualified to pronounce sentence upon the Beautiful, have more vanity than those who believe they possess genius.' Taste in the fine arts, like fashion in society, is indeed considered as a proof of haut-ton, a claim ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 in ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Madame de Stael was right when she said she greatly preferred meeting interesting men and women to admiring places or scenery. Among my pleasantest memories of Los Angeles are my visits to Madame Fremont in her pretty red ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... 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 from a companion to keep it going—produce on a listener exactly the ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... spite of her courage when she took up contributions in the churches dressed as a Neo-Greek) she was always hampered by shyness. She certainly attracted all the best and most gifted of her time, and had a noble fearlessness in friendship, and a constancy which she showed by following Madame de Stael into exile, and in her devotion to Ballenche and Chateaubriand. She had the genius of friendship, a native sincerity, a certain reality of nature—those fine qualities which so often accompany the shy that we almost, as we read biography and history, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... poetical aspect, is the union of passion and imagination. I had foolishly believed that this calm, sweet-voiced woman had loved me, but those letters made it plain that I had been utterly fooled. "Le mystere de l'existence," said Madame de Stael to her daughter, "c'est la rapport de nos erreurs ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... 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 his grenadiers, entered the palace of St. Cloud, and, dispersing with the ...
— Henry Clay's Remarks in House and Senate • Henry Clay
... that the 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 show its frightful head in France, Bonaparte with his grenadiers entered ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... with Rogers,—Madame de Stael, Mackintosh, Sheridan, Erskine, and Payne Knight, Lady Donegall and Miss R. there. Sheridan told a very good story of himself and Madame de Recamier's handkerchief; Erskine a few stories of himself only. She is ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... further back—that he guessed, and how old Paris continued in a manner to echo there; but the post-revolutionary period, the world he vaguely thought of as the world of Chateaubriand, of Madame de Stael, even of the young Lamartine, had left its stamp of harps and urns and torches, a stamp impressed on sundry small objects, ornaments and relics. He had never before, to his knowledge, had present to him relics, of any special dignity, of a private ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... 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
... 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... see the odd way in which books get 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 ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... 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 of more terrible ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... noon, sharp, and that his hired man had instructions to pass 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
... is the novelty in George Sand's way of presenting feminist grievances. She had not invented these grievances. They were already contained in Madame de Stael's books, and I have not forgotten her. Delphine and Corinne, though, were women of genius, and presented to us as such. In order to be pitied by Madame de Stael, it was absolutely necessary to be a woman of genius. For a woman to be defended by George Sand, it was only necessary that she ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... denies the superior mental capacity of man when compared with woman. The nineteenth century don't yield a blind assent to such bosh as Tennyson's, "Woman is the lesser man." It would not do for Madame de Stael to assert (for alas! it was too true then—for the first Napoleon never read Rochefort's "Marseillaise") that man could conquer, but woman must submit to public opinion. To-day Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Anna E. Dickinson take public opinion by storm, because they use the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of frequent invitations to the residence of the Princess of Wales, at Blackheath. In 1814, he visited Paris, where he was introduced to the Duke of Wellington; dined with Humboldt and Schlegel, and met his former friend and correspondent, Madame de Stael. A proposal of Sir Walter Scott, in 1816, to secure him a chair in the University of Edinburgh, was not attended with success. The "Specimens of the British Poets," a work he had undertaken for Mr Murray, appeared in 1819. In 1820, he ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... "Mecanique Celeste." He will easily find Esmenards and Luce de Lancivals. His Pius VII is at Rome, in the cassock of Pius IX. His green uniform has been seen at Strasburg; his eagle has been seen at Boulogne; his grey riding-coat, did he not wear it at Ham? Cassock or riding-coat, 'tis all one. Madame de Stael comes out, of his house. She wrote "Lelia." He smiles on her pending the day when he will exile her. Do you insist on an archduchess? wait awhile and he will get one. Tu, felix Austria, nube. His Murat is called Saint-Arnaud; his Talleyrand is called Morny; his Duc d'Enghien ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... its style being committed to his pen. 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 ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... of 1848 was the Vienna described by Madame de Stael in 1810: 'Dans ce pays, l'on traite les plaisirs comme les devoirs. . . . Vous verrez des hommes et des femmes executer gravement, l'un vis-a-vis de l'autre, les pas d'un menuet dont ils sont impose l'amusement, . . . comme s'il [the couple] dansait ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke |
