talent which had so fascinated her mother, she ruled it
as an autocrat.

The mental coloring of Mme. de Stael was not taken in the shade, as that
of Mme. Roland had been. She was reared in the atmosphere of the great
world. That which her eager mind gathered in solitude was subject always
to the modification which contact with vigorous living minds is sure to
give. The little Germaine Necker who sat on a low stool at her mother's
side, charming the cleverest men of her time by her precocious wit; who
wrote extracts from the dramas she heard, and opinions upon the authors
she read; who made pen-portraits of her friends, and cut out paper kings
and queens to play in the tragedies she composed; whose heart was always
overflowing with love for those around her, and who had supreme need
for an outlet to her sensibilities, was a fresh type in that age of keen
analysis, cold skepticism, and rigid forms. The serious utterances of
her childhood were always suffused with feeling. She loved that which
made her weep. Her sympathies were full and overflowing, and when her
vigorous and masculine intellect took the ascendency it directed them,
but only partly held them in check. It never dulled nor subdued them.
The source of her power, as also of her weakness, lay perhaps in
her vast capacity for love. It gave color and force to her rich and
versatile character. It animated all she did and gave point to all she
wrote. It found expression in the eloquence of her conversation, in the
exaltation and passionate intensity of her affections, in the fervor of
her patriotism, in the self-forgetful generosity that brought her very
near the verge of the scaffold. Here was the source of that indefinable
quality we call genius--not genius of the sort which Buffon has defined
as patience, but the divine flame that crowns with life the dead
materials which patience has gathered.

It was impossible that a child so eager, so sympathetic, so full
of intellect and esprit, should not have developed rapidly in the
atmosphere of her mother's salon. Whether it was the best school for a
young girl may be a question, but a character like that of Mme. de Stael
is apt to go its own way in whatever circumstances it finds itself.
She was the despair of Mme. Necker, whose educational theories were
altogether upset by this precocious daughter who refused to be cast in
a mold. But she was habituated to a high altitude of thought. Men like
Marmontel, La Harpe, Gr