time, finding I can do thee no good, I leave thee,
and so fare thee well."

And so saying, he walked out and walked back to Geneva, while Voltaire
retired in dudgeon to his room, and the company sat expecting something
terrible to happen.

A word, in conclusion, about Coppet!

Necker[63] bought the property from his old banking partner, Thelusson,
for 500,000 livres in French money, and retired to live there when the
French Revolution drove him out of politics. His daughter, Madame de
Stael, inherited it from him, and made it famous.

Not that she loved Switzerland; it would be more true to say that she
detested Switzerland. Swiss scenery meant nothing to her. When she was
taken for an excursion to the glaciers, she asked what the crime was
that she had to expiate by such a punishment; and she could look out on
the blue waters of Lake Leman, and sigh for "the gutter of the Rue du
Bac." Even to this day, the Swiss have hardly forgiven her for that, or
for speaking of the Canton of Vaud as the country in which she had been
"so intensely bored for such a number of years."

What she wanted was to live in Paris, to be a leader--or, rather, to be
"the" leader--of Parisian society, to sit in a salon, the admired of
all admirers, and to pull the wires of politics to the advantage of
her friends. For a while she succeeded in doing this. It was she who
persuaded Barras to give Talleyrand his political start in life. But
whereas Barras was willing to act on her advice, Napoleon was by no
means equally amenable to her influence. Almost from the first he
regarded her as a mischief-maker; and when a spy brought him an
intercepted letter in which Madame de Stael exprest her hope that none
of the old aristocracy of France would condescend to accept appointments
in the household of "the bourgeois of Corsica," he became her personal
enemy, and, refusing her permission to live either in the capital or
near it, practically compelled her to take refuge in her country seat.
Her pleasance in that way became her gilded cage.

Perhaps she was not quite so unhappy there as she sometimes represented.
If she could not go to Paris, many distinguished and brilliant Parisians
came to Coppet, and met there many brilliant and distinguished Germans,
Genevans, Italians, and Danes. The Parisian salon, reconstituted,
flourished on Swiss soil. There visited there, at one time or another,
Madame Recamier and Madame Kruedner; Benjamin Constant, who was