n object of
incessant abuse in the Royalist press, and now the red waves of
Jacobinism were rising higher and higher, surging fiercely around
those to whom she was most attached. Nothing in her life is so
admirable as the courage with which, in this period of the Revolution,
she devoted herself to saving the lives of the proscribed. Her purse
was always open, and she often risked not only her fortune, but her
life. The royal family had always disliked her; but she was filled
with horror at the fate that was impending over them, and she herself
organised a plan for their escape, in which, if it had been accepted,
she would have borne a leading part, at the imminent risk of her head;
and she afterward wrote an earnest and eloquent pamphlet in the hope
of saving the life of the Queen. Sometimes by interceding with those
in power, sometimes by concealing fugitives in the Swedish Embassy,
very often by large and timely gifts of money, she saved many. Her own
life, at the time of the September massacres, was in extreme danger,
and she at last fled to Switzerland. Coppet then became a great centre
of refugees, and many of them owed their lives to her help. Among
others, Narbonne appears to have owed his escape, in part at least, to
her assistance, and she chiefly managed the escape of his daughter.
She was for a long time completely under his charm; but he is said to
have been irritated by her often tactless impetuosity, and especially
by the manner in which public opinion regarded him as her creature,
and he seems to have treated her with much ingratitude. There was no
violent breach, but there was a separation, and a wound which was long
and bitterly felt. Many years later, Madame de Stael, when praising
the Prince de Ligne, said of him: 'He had the manners of Monsieur de
Narbonne--and a heart.'

A short visit to England, in 1793, the death of her mother in May
1794, and the publication of her first purely political work,
'Reflections on Peace, addressed to Mr. Pitt and to the French,' were
the chief events of her life during the next few months. In this work
she dwelt with much force on the absurdity of supposing that any
foreign intervention could restore what the Revolution had destroyed,
and she predicted that the inevitable effect of the prolongation or
extension of the war would be to strengthen that militant Jacobinism
which was now the greatest danger to Europe. In this year, too, she
first came in contact with Benj