"Stael" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... own generation, they represented a distinguished title to fame. Mrs. Inchbald—to use the expression of her biographer—"was ascertained to be one of the greatest ornaments of her sex." She was painted by Lawrence, she was eulogized by Miss Edgeworth, she was complimented by Madame de Stael herself. She had, indeed, won for herself a position which can hardly be paralleled among the women of the eighteenth century—a position of independence and honour, based upon talent, and upon talent alone. In 1796 she published Nature and Art, and ten years later appeared her last work—a series ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... 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
... 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
... Mme. de Stael; one of Talma for the Theatre Francais; the colossal statue of King Rene at Aix; monument to Fenelon at Cambray; the statue of the great Conde at Versailles; the Gutenberg memorial at Strasburg, which is one of his most successful works, and a ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... physically consumed by incessant social 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 be termed love, but is ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... 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 mercilessly up and down through all sorts of charming sophisms, as she begged ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... defiant act of opposition it was perhaps fortunate that his impending marriage gave him an excuse for leaving the country. On the 15th of February 1816, he was married at Leghorn to the daughter of Madame de Stael. He returned to Paris at the end of the year, but took no part in politics until the elections of September 1817 broke the power of the "ultra-royalists" and substituted for the Chambre introuvable a moderate assembly. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... seems to me the basis upon which the mass and the individual, the true democrat and the 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. To understand one's fellow being suffices. This admission partly represents ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... 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 to ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Voltaire 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 for his pleasure. He would have preferred to live in Paris, but was afraid of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... eclecticist. His Philosophy is a positive one compared with that of Emerson. Here are scraps of Plato and Hegel, of Porphyry and Swedenborg, of AEschylus and De Stael. Like the Lehrer zu Sais, 'he looks on the stars, and imitates their courses and positions in the sand.' In the obscurity that proves him great, for 'To be great is to be misunderstood,' (is this the true 'misery of greatness' of Milton?) ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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
... Deffand was poor, and Mme Geoffrin was the wife of a manufacturer. In the salons of these two women edicts were framed, and academicians reared; but the questions discussed there were not nearly of the importance of those to which Mme de Stael's salon gave rise. It was essential that the mistress of the house should have a decided and superior taste in a variety of ways; also a total absence of those little, envious feelings which might have tended to exclude the fashionable ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • 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 Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... 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
... face may hide A Stael before whose mannish pride Our frailer sex shall tremble; Perchance this audience anserine May hiss (O fluttering Muse of ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... he 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 ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... 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:[95] he was a philosopher; ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... to have his own roof-tree when possible. Therefore, the summer of 1827 sent them from rue St. Maur to the village of St. Ouen, on the banks of the Seine and a league from the gates of Paris. The village itself was not attractive, but pleasant was the home, next to a small chateau where Madame de Stael lived when her father, M. Necker, was in power. Some twenty-two spacious, well-furnished rooms this summer home had, in which once lived the Prince de Soubise when grand veneur of Louis XV, who went there at times to eat his dinner—"in what served us for a drawing-room," Cooper ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... 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 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... 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; he was a supporter of Louis Philippe, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... darkness reveals the tiny lanterns which guide these boats, and they look like shadows passing by, lit by stars. Everything in this region is mystery—government, custom, love."—Corinne or Italy, by Madame de Stael, 1888, pp. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... blackening Alexander they were doing humanity good service. But also, without doubt, many of his assailants, like those of other great men, have been mainly instigated by "that strongest of all antipathies, the antipathy of a second-rate mind to a first-rate one," [De Stael.] and by the envy which talent too often ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... "lyrics to the Lost one," or stanzas on a sickly geranium, miserably perishing in the mephitic atmosphere of routs—these we masculine tyrants, we Dionysii of literature, ill-naturedly have accounted your prerogatives of authorship. But who then are Sevigne and Somerville, Edgeworth and De Stael, Barbauld and Benger, and Aikin, and Jameson, Hemans, Landon, and a thousand more, not less learned, less accomplished, nor less useful? Forgive, great names, my half-repeated slander: riding with the self-conceited ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft (Beschlusz).—De Stael's rendering, which is so well known, and which I have employed, is ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... 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 ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... or for Mademoiselle 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 after her marriage. "The ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... has left us such charming memoirs, under the name of Madame de Stael, "do you believe in my ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... condemned, perhaps, to a succession of arduous though minute duties in which, oftentimes, there is nothing to charm and little to distract, unless she be allowed the exercise of her pen must fall into melancholy and despair, and perish, (to use the language of Mad. de Stael,) ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... not 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
... the will of 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 ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... 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 Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... dictating bulletins and articles for the 'Moniteur,' revising the details of the budgets, giving instructions to architects as to alterations to be made at the Tuileries and the Church of the Madelaine, throwing an occasional sarcasm at Madame de Stael and the Parisian journals, interfering to put down a squabble at the Grand Opera, carrying on a correspondence with the Sultan of Turkey and the Schah of Persia, so that while his body was at Finkenstein, his mind seemed to be working ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... had the honour 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 accepted ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • 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, ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... 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 one. In repose this woman's face is absolute nullity. She starts ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... art and letters he was brought into more or less intimate contact with Sir Humphry Davy, the Edgeworths, Sir James Mackintosh, Colman the dramatic author, the older Kean, Monk Lewis, Grattan, Curran, and Madame de Stael. Of a meeting of the last two he remarks, "It was like the confluence of the Rhone and the Saone, and they were both so ugly that I could not help wondering how the best intellects of France and Ireland could have taken up respectively ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... Commons that the rupture 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 of ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... in 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
... Madam de Stael said very justly to an Englishman, "Dans vos routes le corps fait plus de frai que l'esprit." But even if there are persons of a constitution robust enough to talk, they dare not do so, when twenty heads are forced into the compass of one square foot; nay, even if, to your ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... science, and money-making, and brings them before her readers with great success. Louis XVIII. and the members of his family, Talleyrand, Decazes, Courier, Constant, Humboldt, Cuvier, Madame Tallien, De Stael, Delphine Gay, Gerard, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Liszt, are among the actors whom she introduces in most real and living proportions. Here is a charming specimen of her skill in portraiture. She is speaking of Madame Tallien, then Princess of Chimay, whom she saw in 1818: "She was then some forty ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... "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 my soul to-day to overflowing, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... noble and interesting 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 ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... This apparent unconcern explained her son's refusal to make a sacrifice for this marriage of his liberal opinions,—the term "liberal" having lately been created for the Emperor Alexander by, I think, Madame de Stael, through the ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... Neckar's, he electrified his hostess and her guests by making a speech of some five hundred words in length, too long to be quoted here in full, but so full of import and delivered with such an air of authority that La Fayette, who was present, paled visibly, and Mirabeau, drawing Madame de Stael to one side, whispered, trembling with emotion, "Who is that ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... Stael described it as "frozen music;" and a cathedral is a glorious specimen of "thought in stone," whose very windows are ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... audience do not permit the spirit of Hamlet's father to appear on the stage: "L'apparition se passe, (says Madame de Stael)[3], en entier dans la physionomie de Talma, et certes elle n'en est pas ainsi moins effrayante. Quand, au milieu d'un entretien calme et melancolique, tout a coup il apercoit le spectre, on suit tout; ses mouvemens dans les yeux qui le contemplent, et l'on ne peut ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... spirit; the Countess Albrizzi, a Venetian lady, of high acquirements, joined in it with considerable talent and animation. Cuvier had a very remarkable countenance, not handsome, but agreeable, and his manner was pleasing and modest, and his conversation very interesting. Madame de Stael having died lately, was much discussed. She was much praised for her good-nature, and for the brilliancy of her conversation. They agreed, that the energy of her character, not old age, had worn her out. Cuvier said, the force of her ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... 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 ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... gave in their first aspirations, is yet true; and a better valor and a purer truth shall one day organize their belief. Or why should a woman liken herself to any historical woman, and think, because Sappho,[359] or Sevigne,[360] or De Stael,[361] or the cloistered souls who have had genius and cultivation, do not satisfy the imagination and the serene Themis,[362] none can,—certainly not she. Why not? She has a new and unattempted problem to solve, perchance that of the happiest nature that ever bloomed. Let ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... power in the lives of many famous people, intimate with Madame de Stael, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Madame de Choiseul, the Duchess of Luxembourg, Madame Necker, Hume, Madame de Genlis. In her salon old creeds were argued down, new ideas disseminated, and bons mots and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... dogmatized about women and their education and the laws of behavior. 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
... 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 ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... don't know 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 ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... discoursed with his companion of Paris and its excellencies with a skill that soon absorbed all her attention, "Paris, ce magnifique Paris," having almost as much influence on the happiness of the governess, as it was said to have had on that of Madame de Stael, Eve's companion dropped his voice to a tone that was rather confidential for a stranger, although it ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... midst of this 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 they are assailed for suggestions ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... indebted to French science, philosophy, and art that it would be strange if he did not betray an occasional soupcon of partisanship. His treatment of Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, Madame de Stael, Oberman, Madame de Kruedener, and all the queer saints and scribbling sinners of that period is as entertaining as it is instructive. It gives one the spiritual complexion of the period in clear lines and vivid colors, which can never be forgotten. Nearly all that makes France France is ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... what style of architecture prevails in the medley of different periods constituting London is indeed difficult. One authority concludes that the "dark house in the long, unlovely street," of which Tennyson tells, and Mme. de Stael vituperates, covers the greater number of acres. The fact is, each of the districts constituting London as it now is, i. e., Belgravia, Tyburnia, Bayswater, Kensington, Chelsea, etc., has the impress and character of the time of its greatest popularity and fashion and of the ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... more. The general has ably withstood the cares and hardships of his Siberian life. He is forty-five years of age, active and vigorous, and capable of doing much before his way of life is fallen into the sere and yellow leaf. Like Madame De Stael, he possesses the power of putting visitors entirely at their ease. To my single countrywomen I will whisper that General Korsackoff is of about medium height, has a fair complexion, blue eyes, and Saxon hair, and a face which the most crabbed misanthrope could not ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... good for nothing; what do young women stand in need of, to be well brought up in France?"—"Of mothers," answered Madame Campan. "It is well said," replied Napoleon. "Well, madame, let the French be indebted to you for bringing up mothers for their children."—"Napoleon one day interrupted Madame de Stael in the midst of a profound political argument to ask her whether she had ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... n'est 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
... Christian art, whose highest expression was sought in the Gothic, in the glooms, the mysteries, the 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 ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... 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 Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... events that they for the most part involuntarily became mere political partisans. Among others, but with a considerable modification on the score of the literary element, may be instanced Madame de Stael, who by descent, education, and natural bias was inevitably destined to aim at political power. The extent and prominence of that exercised by her must have been considerable, though certainly overrated by Napoleon, ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... on 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 ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... so well known as Napoleon because the glamour of Napoleon's life reduced to silence the lives of his contemporaries. He asserts that in the future, Bolivar 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 Bolivar has had few biographers, and a very few have spoken of him with the power and authority of those who praised ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... 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 delicacy in the expression of them. In ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... 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 ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... 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, ...
— Henry Clay's Remarks in House and Senate • Henry Clay
... upwards, and each time some 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, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... you will lose your 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 a "little miss, dressed in a new gown for a dancing-school ball, receives as complete ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... 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 ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... 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 of all ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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 ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... de S—, a lady of advanced views, no longer very young, once upon a time the intriguing wife of a now dead and forgotten diplomat. Her loud pretensions to be one of the leaders of modern thought and of modern sentiment, she sheltered (like Voltaire and Mme. de Stael) on the republican territory of Geneva. Driving through the streets in her big landau she exhibited to the indifference of the natives and the stares of the tourists a long-waisted, youthful figure of hieratic stiffness, with a pair of big gleaming ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... after death, for her symmetrical Christian character. One of her writings, entitled "Transplanted Flowers," has been published in conjunction with one of the Duchesse de Broglie, daughter of Madame de Stael, with whom she was intimately associated ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... leave, 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 ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... Stael and Madame Recamier are good illustrations of this point. The former, by her fearless expressions of wit, exposed herself to the detestation of the majority of mankind. "She has shafts," said Napoleon, "which would hit a man if he were ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... the 1st of January 1808. On his way he stopped for a short time at Chambery, where a young man had been waiting for him several days. This was Madame de Stael's son, who was then not more than seventeen years of age. M. Auguste de Stael lodged at the house of the postmaster of Chambery, and as the Emperor was expected in the course of the night, he gave orders that he should be called ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... her excitedly. "Great Scott! With a grandmother who has made the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat a household word, and a mother who was the cleverest woman advertising copy-writer in New York, this young lady ought to be a composite Hetty Green, Madame de Stael, Hypatia, and Emma McChesney Buck. She'll be a lady ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... 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 ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 been without her—oh, then, I am ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... family of the quiet and eminently respectable country lawyer appear to have had no cause to regret the enduring friendship of the brilliant young conversationalist, who afterwards became an intimate friend of Wordsworth, Southey the Laureate, and the Lake School, with Goethe, Madame de Stael, and many other great names in the world of letters and art, and even had the offer of the Chancellorship of the ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... 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 ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... brought before my mind Arthur's reading, and the life with which he invested the words of these old-time philosophers that had so keen an interest for him; while Madame de Stael's "Allemagne," and my little copy of Ehlert's "Letters on Music" were associated with almost every hour of the day. They had lain upon my writing-table the entire summer, and it was my habit whenever ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... (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 ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... 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
... 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, and supplied her with leaves. Well, do what you will that is harmless, if it but serve to pin your ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... prefect of Loire-et-Cher, in 1811. Friend of Mme. de Stael who authorized him to place Louis Lambert, at her expense, in the College of Vendome. He probably died ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... 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 Roland, ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... 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
... audience of the emperor, or even an interview with Count Nesselrode, but Lafayette took up the cause with his hearty zeal for everything that concerned the United States, and, in a long interview with the emperor at the house of Madame de Stael, submitted to him the view taken by the United States of the controversy, and obtained from him his promise to exert his personal influence with the British government on his arrival at London. Baron von Humboldt, the Prussian minister at Paris, who had been influenced by British misrepresentation, ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... women of genius of the Old World who abused the use of alcohol and opium, were Coleridge, James Thomson, Carew, Sheridan, Steele, Addison, Hoffman, Charles Lamb, Madame de Stael, Burns, Savage, Alfred de Musset, Kleist, Caracci, Jan Steen, Morland Turner (the painter), Gerard de Nerval, Hartley Coleridge, Dussek, Handel, Glueck, Praga, Rovani, and the poet Somerville. This list is by no means complete, as the well-informed reader may ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... 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 true conversation is more like a fugue in four or eight parts ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... passion had become a link of his life. Suffering as he was from the uncertainty to which the reply of Aminta subjected him, he could not but admire her prudence and modest reserve, which, as it were, placed her heart beneath the aegis of reason. Besides, if, as Madame de Stael says, the last idea of a woman is always centred in the last word she utters, Aminta, by what she had last said, had delighted Maulear. She had ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... verse, nor do I know that I shall do so, having been tuneless since I crossed the Alps, and feeling, as yet, no renewal of the "estro." By the way, I suppose you have seen "Glenarvon." Madame de Stael lent it me to read from Copet last autumn. It seems to me that, if the authoress had written the truth, and nothing but the truth—the whole truth—the romance would not only have been more romantic, but more entertaining. As for the likeness, the picture ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 474 - Vol. XVII. No. 474., Supplementary Number • Various
... termed "conversation." She had read of the houses of brilliant 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— what conversation they must have delighted their friends with and how ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... receiving a pension of L100 a year, met M. d'Arblay in January, 1793, when she was staying with her friends the Locks at Norbury Park. He was living at Juniper Hall with other French emigres—a brilliant little colony; Madame de Stael was there, and de Narbonne, and de Lally Tollendal, and Talleyrand. The General began as tutor, and the course of Fanny Burney's acquaintance with Juniperians, as her sister Mrs. Phillips used to call them, and particularly ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... contemptible, character, received, like the hermits of old, the visits of pilgrims, not only from his own nation, but from the farthest boundaries of Europe. Here too is Bonnet's abode, and, a few steps beyond, the house of that astonishing woman Madame de Stael: perhaps the first of her sex, who has really proved its often claimed equality with, the nobler man. We have before had women who have written interesting-novels and poems, in which their tact at observing drawing-room characters has availed them; but never since the days of Heloise have those faculties ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... make poor 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 protection ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... government. It is generally admitted that public 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 ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... the same whether 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 and plains, yet the psalms of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... Oeuvres completes de Madame la Baronne de Stael, publiees par son Fils. Precedees d'une notice sur le caractere et les ecrits de Madame de Stael, par Madame Necker de Saussure. Paris, 17 vols. 8vo. ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... 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, begin to ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... blind to the 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 ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott |
