would make jokes. To all this she attaches no importance; but I think differently. I take everything seriously.

666

Once more, why should your mother wish to put herself within reach of my tyranny? for you see I speak plainly. Let her go to Rome, Naples, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Lyons; if she wants to publish libels, let her go to London. I should think of her with pleasure in any of these cities; but Paris, you see, is where I live myself, and I want none but those who love me there. If I should let her come to Paris, she would do absurd things; she would cause me to lose all the people about me; she would cause me to lose Garat. Was it not through her that I lost the Tribunate? She could not help talking politics.

666 If your mother were at Paris, they would always be bringing me stories about her. Once more, Paris is where I live; I will not have her there.'

"Upon renewed solicitations, the Emperor continued:

"You are very young; if you were at my age, your judgment upon such matters would be better; but I like to hear a son plead the cause of his mother.

"Your mother has given you a very difficult commission, and you have acquitted yourself well. I am pleased to have had this conversation with you; but you will obtain nothing. The king of Naples has petitioned me often upon the subject, but without success. If I had put her in prison, I would retract the sentence; but exile, no. Everybody understands that to be a prisoner is a misfortune, but your mother cannot be unhappy when I leave her all Europe.'' pp. 124, 125.

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The time came, however, when the despotic Emperor would have been glad to welcome to Paris the woman he had persecuted. Upon his escape from Elba, he found it an easy matter to conciliate Benjamin Constant, one of the most violent of his opponents; and he anticipated the same success with Madame de Staël. He sent for her, on the plea that her presence was needed in Paris for the encouragement of constitutional ideas. She was at Coppet when she received this message. She refused to return. "He has done without either a constitution or me for the last twelve years," she said; "and even now he is not much fonder of one than of the other."

But, much as Madame de Staël rejoiced in the downfall of Napoleon, she was too devoted a patriot to relish the occupation of France by foreign troops. She was in England in

1814, when Paris was taken by the allies. "Why do you felicitate me upon an event which fills me with despair," she said, when her friends congratulated her. She returned to Paris, but it was not the Paris for which she had been pining for ten long years. The sight of the foreign soldiery was a constant mortification; and, before Napoleon escaped from Elba, she talked of going to Greece, to write there a poem upon Richard Cœur de Lion. This project was never accomplished. After the hundred days, a trip to Italy for the benefit of M. de Rocca's health, and negotiations relating to her daughter's marriage, prevented her return to Paris.

Madame Lenormant gives us no further information concerning M. de Rocca, the young officer whom Madame de Staël privately married in 1811. We simply know that she met him first at Geneva, where he was suffering from the wounds he had received in the Peninsular War. She was kind to him, and he fell in love with her. Madame de Saussure and Madame Lenormant state that she was happy in this connection. But we can hardly imagine a woman being happy in a marriage of which she was ashamed. Madame de Staël was not accustomed to concealments, and her endeavors to keep this connection from the knowledge of the world must have been a perpetual trial to one of her temperament. Not even to Madame Récamier, her tried and confidential friend, did she confide her secret. M. de Rocca's wretched health was another source of anxiety. She watched over him with the greatest solicitude; and he survived her one year. Chateaubriand, who saw Madame de Staël several times during her last illness, thus describes his first and last meeting with M. de Rocca.

"I approached, and, when my eye grew a little accustomed to the darkness, I distinguished the invalid. Her cheeks were flushed with fever; her expression was bright; she knew me, in spite of the obscurity, and said, 'Bon jour, my dear Francis.* I am suffering, but that does not prevent me loving you.' She extended her hand, which I pressed and kissed. Raising my head, I perceived something on the opposite side of the couch, in the space between the bed and the wall,

* Madame de Staël always adopted the English rendering of "Mon cher" when addressing Chateaubriand.

which rose white and meagre. It was M. de Rocca. His face was haggard, his cheeks were hollow, his eyes bloodshot, and his complexion undefinable. He was dying; and I had never seen him before, and I have never seen him since. He said nothing, but inclined his head as he passed me. I could not hear his footfall; he glided away like a shade. Pausing a moment at the door, the shadowy idol turned toward the bed, making a sign with his fingers, as though summoning Madame de Staël. These two spectres, looking at each other in silence, - the one upright and pale, the other seated, and flushed by the blood ready to flow down and freeze at her heart, - made me shudder."

Madame de Staël died in July, 1817, at the age of fifty-one. She had returned to Paris the preceding January, when her altered appearance struck her friends with dismay. But, though miserably weak, and only able to sleep by means of opiates, she was not aware of her situation. She received her friends as usual, and invited them to dinner, though not able to be present herself. Shortly before her death, she said to Chateaubriand: "Happy or sorrowful, I have always been the same. I have loved God, my father, and liberty." She ejaculated repeatedly, "My father is waiting for me on the other shore." In a conversation with Augustus Schlegel, she remarked: "I think I know what the passage is from life to death, and I am sure that the goodness of God will soften it. Our brain is confused, and the suffering is not very acute." Her anticipations were realized. She passed away quietly in sleep. Her death was a great blow to her friends, and Madame Récamier was especially inconsolable. The friendship between these women redounds to the honor of both. Between the greatest beauty and the most gifted woman of their day there existed the most perfect sympathy and affection. Madame de Staël enjoyed the successes of her lovely friend in society, and, though she coveted her beauty, was never jealous of her popularity. Her remark, that she would barter all her talents for the boon of beauty, has often been cited as a proof of her overweening vanity. It proceeded more probably from a desire to be loved. She had seen in the universal adoration of Madame Récamier the power of beauty, and she longed for something better and sweeter than intellectual incense. No one can read Madame de Staël's writings without recognizing her immense

capacity for loving. It is true, she sought and challenged homage of the intellect; but it was only because her heart was restless and unsatisfied. "I will force my daughter," she says, "to make a marriage of inclination"; and she does not compliment Madame Récamier so much upon her beauty as

upon her power of inspiring affection. "I have told you a

thousand times," she writes, "that you are the happiest of human beings, and you will not believe me. I see, however, the impression you make. I know that it is at the same time magical and engaging, and such power seems to me to be the most sublime earthly happiness."

Her letters to this friend outnumber those to the Duchess, and are decidedly more interesting. They are confidential, and breathe the tenderest affection. Madame Lenormant's comments and explanations, forming a sort of running biography in connection with the correspondence, are always pleasant. Her refutations of M. Thiers's mistake in regard to Madame de Staël's course during the hundred days are able and satisfactory, while her extracts from contemporary writers are judicious and timely. For these as well as other reasons Coppet et Weimar will be regarded as a valuable contribution to literature, and must commend itself to all interested in the author of L'Allemagne and Corinne.

ART. VI. - AFRICANS IN AMERICA, AND THEIR NEW GUARDIANS.

1. The True Story of the Barons of the South. By E. W. REynolds. Boston Walker, Wise, & Co.

2. The Cotton Kingdom. By FREDERIC LAW OLMSTED. New York: Mason Brothers.

3. Correspondence of the Educational Commission. (Unpublished.)

THE Compromise of 1850 was a boundary very clearly marked in our political history. It was an epoch from which to date a new phase in the great controversy that has so perplexed the life of our nation. It was a moment of artificial

and unstable equilibrium, — an armistice which the stage of the campaign compelled, which the stress of the campaign would certainly invade before long. Eight months of deadlock in the machinery of government satisfied each party that it was in no condition to push any immediate conquests, and must accept a truce. No well-informed person doubts now that the programme of Secession was pretty thoroughly matured as early as then; and no thoughtful person then, who had watched the course of the debate, could fail to see that a conflict had been deferred, perhaps averted, for which the North was certainly unprepared, whatever the South might be. The phases of it since, or its magnitude, no one could anticipate then with any clearness; yet it is within our personal knowledge that President Fillmore, in assenting to the terms of compromise, did it under the conviction that the controversy was sure to issue in blood eventually; that the best wisdom of a statesman, and his official duty at any rate, was to put it off as long as possible.

At the bottom of the controversy lay the dark fact of an enslaved race in one section of the republic, - a race increasing rapidly in numbers, to some extent in intelligence and power, and attracting to an extraordinary degree the attention and sympathy of the civilized world, a race making the basis of the system of industry, the social structure, and the political power of a large community. Philanthropy had, in a sense, assumed the special guardianship of this race, a guardianship which had been resented with the most violent pride and indignation. The pride and indignation were natural and sincere. We need not assume that the claim made by many of the masters, in the name of humanity and intelligence, was not sincere also. No doubt whatever exists in our own mind, that humane men, enlightened and thoughtful men, in the South, believed as fully in the tutelage of the blacks committed providentially to their hands, as most men believe in anything. They believed that the legal tutelage of that race, involving to some degree property in their persons and the labor of their sinews, was the only way of saving them from vagabondage, and the whole structure of society from ruin. And they wished sincerely that this "involuntary VOL. LXXIII. 5TH S. VOL. XI. NO. I.

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