first romance, _Delphine_, and a book on
literature. She now travelled for some years in Germany and Italy in the
company of Benjamin Constant, who was the object of one of her numerous
accesses of affection. _Corinne_, her principal novel, and her greatest
work but one, appeared in 1807, her book _De l'Allemagne_ being
suppressed in Paris, whither she had returned, but which she soon had to
leave again. The Restoration gave her access once more to France, and
enabled her to resume possession of property which had been unjustly
seized, but she died not long afterwards, in 1817. Her _Dix Annees
d'Exil_ and her _Considerations sur la Revolution Francaise_ were
published posthumously, the latter being one of her chief works. She had
married secretly, in 1812, a M. de Rocca, a man more than young enough
to be her son.

The personality of Madame de Stael is far from being attractive owing to
her excessive vanity, which disgusted all her contemporaries, and the
folly which made a woman, who had never been beautiful, continue, long
after she had ceased to be young, to give herself in life and literature
the airs of a newest Heloise. But she is a very important figure in
French literature. Part of her influence, as represented by the book _De
l'Allemagne,_ does not directly concern us in this chapter; this part
was mainly, but not wholly, literary. It was helped and continued,
however, by her other works, especially by her novels, and, above all,
by _Corinne_. This influence, put briefly, was to break up the
narrowness of French notions on all subjects, and to open it to fresh
ideas. Her political and general works led the way to the nineteenth
century, side by side with Chateaubriand's, but in an entirely different
sense. What Chateaubriand inculcated was the sense of the beauty of
older and simpler times, countries, and faiths which the
self-satisfaction of the eighteenth century had obscured; what Madame de
Stael had to impress were general ideas of liberalism and progress to
which the same century, in its crusade against superstition and its
rather short-sighted belief in its own enlightenment, was equally blind.
_Delphine_, which is in the main a romance of French society only,
written before the author had seen much of any other world except a
close circle of French emigrants abroad, exhibits this tendency much
less than _Corinne_, which was written after that German visit--by far
the most important event of Madame de Sta