amin Constant, and her acquaintance
soon developed into a connection which gave her a new and powerful
instrument for acting on French politics, but which also brought with
it much suffering, many reproaches, and long and lasting discredit. In
May 1795 we find her again in Paris, with her husband, who had once
more been sent on a mission to France; again eagerly engaged in French
politics; again largely occupied in defending the interests of her
proscribed friends. Among others, Talleyrand appears to have owed his
recall to her influence. As usual, she excited many antipathies, she
was denounced in the Convention by Legendre for her political
intrigues and especially for her efforts in favour of the emigrants,
and she was obliged to leave Paris for about eighteen months. Her pen
was at this time very active, and to this period belong her 'Essay on
Novels' and her 'Treatise on the Passions.'

The star of Bonaparte was now rapidly rising, and it profoundly
affected the last years of her life. The pages in her 'Considerations
on the French Revolution' in which she describes her first interview
with him, after the peace of Campo Formio, are among the most graphic
she ever wrote, though something of the shadow of the picture was, no
doubt, drawn from later experience and antipathy. She was at first
dazzled; she was at all times profoundly impressed by his genius, but
she soon came to perceive that his nature was wholly unlike that of
other men. She had seen, she said, men worthy of all respect, and she
had seen men noted for their ferocity; but the impression produced on
her by Bonaparte was generically different from that produced by
either of these classes. She found that such epithets as 'good,'
'violent,' 'gentle,' and 'cruel' could not be applied to him in their
ordinary senses. He was in truth a being who stood self-centred, and
apart from the sympathies, passions, and enthusiasms of his kind,
habitually regarding men, not as fellow-creatures, but as mere
counters in a game; a will of colossal strength; an intellect of
clear, cold, transcendent power, solely governed by the imperturbable
calculation of the strictest egotism, and never drawn aside by love or
hatred, by pity or religion, or by attachment to any cause. It was
impossible, she found, to exaggerate his contempt for human nature and
his disbelief in the reality of human virtue. A perfectly honest man
was the only kind of man he never could understand. Such a