"Madame de Stael" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spite, and the venturesomeness of Lady Mary Wortley. We have not as yet much female poetry; but there is a truly feminine tenderness, purity, and elegance in the Psyche of Mrs. Tighe, and in some of the smaller pieces of Lady Craven. On some of the works of Madame de Stael—her Corinne especially—there is a still deeper stamp of the genius of her sex. Her pictures of its boundless devotedness—its depth and capacity of suffering—its high aspirations—its painful irritability, and inextinguishable thirst for emotion, are powerful specimens of that morbid ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... strike out, and the awful, earth-shaking explosion would follow. After the Revolution, during the First Empire, so called,—the usurpation, that is, of Napoleon Bonaparte,—literature was well-nigh extinguished in France. The names, however, then surpassingly brilliant, of Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, belong to ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... Christianity has originated many more crimes than it has hindered, and it would no longer be possible to establish with real Christians a vital community as at present understood. He declares the utterance of Madame de Stael, that "to comprehend everything means to forgive everything," the truest word ever spoken; and concludes his lecture with the remarks that the more man renounces his faith and confides in his own power, his own reason, his own reflexion, the happier he will be ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... the author, however full of his subject, has evidently been thinking of his readers. His tone is that of a speaker with his audience before him. Madame de Stael actually composed in conversation, and her works are little more than imperfect records of her eloquent discourse. Innumerable productions have been read aloud, or handed round in private coteries, before being revised and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... thought; but as He passed the old words through the alembic of His mind they came out with new meaning. His originality consisted in His discriminating appropriation of His inheritance, and in His using it so that it became alive with new power. Madame de Stael said that Rousseau "invented nothing, but set everything on fire." Jesus took the religion of Israel, and lived its life with God, and after Him it possessed a kindling flame it had never shown before. The faith of a small people in a corner of the Roman ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... single instance of a woman who is supreme in a class of literature which has engaged the ambition of men; Madame Dacier still reigns the queen of blue stockings, though women have long studied Greek without shame; {33} Madame de Stael's name still rises first to the lips when we are asked to mention a woman of great intellectual power; Madame Roland is still the unrivalled type of the sagacious and sternly heroic, yet lovable woman; George Sand ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... appeared the manuscript of St. Helena made a great impression upon Europe. This pamphlet was generally regarded as a precursor of the memoirs which Napoleon was thought to be writing in his place of exile. The report soon spread that the work was conceived and executed by Madame de Stael. Madame de Stael, for her part, attributed it to Benjamin Constant, from whom she was at this time separated by some disagreement." Afterwards it came to be known that the author was the Marquis Lullin de Chateauvieux, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... return to the impression produced by the grand facade, we are more and more struck with the subtile art displayed in its adaptations and symbolisms. Never did any structure we have looked upon so fully justify Madame de Stael's definition of architecture, as "frozen music." The outermost towers, their pillars and domes, are all square, their outlines thus passing without too sudden transitions from the sharp square angles ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... brain she'll have," Buck reminded her excitedly. "Great Scott! With a grandmother who has made the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat a household word, and a mother who was the cleverest woman advertising copy-writer in New York, this young lady ought to be a composite Hetty Green, Madame de Stael, Hypatia, and Emma McChesney Buck. She'll be a lady wizard of ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... the lives of many famous people, intimate with Madame de Stael, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Madame de Choiseul, the Duchess of Luxembourg, Madame Necker, Hume, Madame de Genlis. In her salon old creeds were argued down, new ideas disseminated, and bons mots and witty gossip circulated. She has recounted what went on, and explained the reign of clever ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... Great Ghost is melting into thin air. Thousands of people have lost all belief in his existence. They use his name, and take it in vain; for when questioned, they merely stand up for "a sort of a something." The fear of God, so to speak, has survived his personality; just as Madame de Stael said she did not believe in ghosts, but she was afraid of them. Mrs. Browning gives voice to this sentiment in ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... Francaise; Biographie Universelle; A. Lameth's Histoire de l'Assemblee Constituante; Alison's History of the French Revolution; Lamartine's History of the Girondists; Lacretelle's History of France; Montigny's Memoires sur Mirabeau; Peuchet's Memoires sur Mirabeau; Madame de Stael's Considerations sur la Revolution Francaise; Macaulay's Essay on Dumont's ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... sail, and make the passage to Dieppe in about fourteen hours. On August 13 Mr. Murray informs his wife that "Lord Byron was here yesterday, and I introduced him to Blackwood, to whom he was very civil. They say," he added, "that Madame de Stael has been ordered to quit Paris, for writing lightly respecting the Bourbons." Two days later he ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... whom she had collaborated in her "memoirs." Wielding a ready pen, he gave good value, for the chapters were well sprinkled with choice classical quotations and elegant extracts from the poets, together with allusions to Aristotle and Theophrastus, to Madame de Stael and ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... Montmorency did not adhere to his revolutionary ideas. After the 10th of August, 1792, he withdrew to Switzerland, at Coppet, near his friend Madame de Stael. Under the Empire he held himself apart. He had become as conservative as he had been liberal, as religious as he had been Voltairian. Under the Restoration, he was one of the most convinced supporters of the throne and the altar. Minister of Foreign Affairs ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... in Wales Character and Habits of Piozzi Brynbella Illness and Death of Piozzi Miss Thrale's Marriage The Conway Episode Anecdotes Celebration of her Eightieth Birthday Her Death and Will Madame D'Arblay's Parallel between Mrs. Piozzi and Madame de Stael Character of Mrs. Piozzi, ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... this solemn premeditation, which tends, as Madame de Stael says, to bring more poetry into life, some women, in whom virtuous mothers either from considerations of worldly advantage of duty or sentiment, or through sheer hypocrisy, have inculcated steadfast ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... front gate, duster in hand (she never conversed quite as well without it, and never did anything else with it), might have been a humble American descendant of Madame de Stael talking on the terrace at Coppet, with the famous sprig of olive in her fingers. She moved among her subjects like a barouche among express wagons, was heard after them as a song after sermons. That she did not fulfil the whole duty of ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Facing-both-Ways. Jeffrey thinks it generally a duty to conceal his fears and affect a confidence which he does not feel; but perhaps the best piece of writing in his essays is that in which he for once gives full expression to his pessimist sentiment. It occurs in a review of a book in which Madame de Stael maintains the doctrine of human perfectibility. Jeffrey explains his more despondent view in a really eloquent passage. He thinks that the increase of educated intelligence will not diminish the permanent causes of human misery. War will ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... his kind did;" that they should "devote themselves to falsifying nature, refining and subtilizing sentiment, and modifying psychology after their own fancy," like Bulwer and Dickens, as well as like Rousseau and Madame de Stael, not to mention Balzac, the worst of all that sort at his worst. This was the natural course of the disease; but it really seems as if it were their criticism that was to blame for the rest: not, indeed, for the performance of this writer or that, for criticism can never affect ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... perfect mania for literary distinction. His own education was somewhat imperfect, but he is determined his children shall be prodigies. His first-born turns out a girl, who is to write like Madame de Stael,—to be an able, accomplished woman. He bores her with literature from her earliest years, reads extracts from Milton to her when she is only eight years old and is secretly longing to be playing with her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... and eminently respectable country lawyer appear to have had no cause to regret the enduring friendship of the brilliant young conversationalist, who afterwards became an intimate friend of Wordsworth, Southey the Laureate, and the Lake School, with Goethe, Madame de Stael, and many other great names in the world of letters and art, and even had the offer of the Chancellorship of the Duchy of ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... use of intermediate tegumentary coverings, made of thin rubber or gold-beater's skin, and so often relied upon as absolute preventives, Madame de Stael is reputed to have said, 'They are cobwebs for protection, and bulwarks against love.' Their employment certainly must produce a feeling of shame and disgust utterly destructive of the true delight of pure ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... laziness. Monkeys rest only during sleep. Old age does not affect their nimbleness; they can be fattened, for I have seen baboons as sleek as seals, but, like Gibbon, Henry Buckle, and Marshal Vendome, they prove that the energy of a strong will can bear up under such burdens. Madame de Stael, too, managed to combine a progressive embonpoint with the undiminished brilliancy of her genius, though it is certain that adipose tissue does not feed the flame of every mind. Charles Dickens in his "American ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... events of the year were the publication of Beyle's "Lives of Mozart and Haydn"; the performance of Scribe's early plays, and the death of Madame de Stael, which occurred on July 14. This gifted daughter of Necker had not been allowed to return to France until after the fall of Napoleon. Her last work was a treatise of the Constitutional Government, entitled "Considerations sur les Principaux Evenements de la ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... demons of ambition." The delineation of the Maid of Orleans, in the first Part of Henry VI., is associated with the greatest name in our literature, and therefore, we presume, must be treated with respect; but it is the only title to respect we can discover in it. We cannot, with Madame de Stael, trace the inspired maid in any part of the play. La Pucelle gives us, it is true, in the commencement, a very good account of herself; as she was playing the part of an impostor, it was not probable she would do otherwise: but her own manner very soon betrays the courtesan; and, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... original sin; that doctrine puts him necessarily on his guard against appearances, sustains his apprehension under perplexity, and prepares him for recognising anywhere what he knows to be everywhere." 100 There is a popular saying of Madame de Stael, that we forgive whatever we really understand. The paradox has been judiciously pruned by her descendant, the Duke de Broglie, in the words: "Beware of too much explaining, lest we end by too much excusing." 101 History, says Froude, does teach ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... preservation of a free government. It is generally admitted that public liberty, and the perpetuity of a free constitution, rest on the virtue and intelligence of the community which enjoys it. How is that virtue to be inspired, and how is that intelligence to be communicated? Bonaparte once asked Madame de Stael in what manner he could best promote the happiness of France. Her reply is full of political wisdom. She said, "Instruct the mothers of the French people." Mothers are, indeed, the affectionate and effective teachers of the human ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... times, Madame de Stael had a dish of very unique pattern, and, when driven by the command of Napoleon from her beloved Paris, she carried her chafing-dish with her into exile as one of her most cherished household gods. At the present day among the favored few, who have full purses, are found ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill
... and "Goetz," and "The Robbers," and Monk Lewis and the youthful Scott. And the reason is not far to seek. The newcomers found England in possession of a native romanticism of a very robust type, by the side of which the imported article showed like a delicate exotic. Carlyle affirms that Madame de Stael's book was the precursor of whatever acquaintance with German literature exists in England. He himself worked valiantly to extend that acquaintance by his articles in the Edinburgh and Foreign Review, and by his translations from German romance. But he found among ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... and thinking Madame de Stael has asserted that "Hobbes was an Atheist and a Slave." Yet I still think that Hobbes believed, and proved, the necessary existence of a Deity, and that he loved freedom, as every sage desires it. It is now time to offer an apology for one of those great men who are the contemporaries ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... and caustic statesman was born and brought up in the Catholic Church. He married a Protestant lady, one of the most charming and brilliant women of her time, the daughter of Madame de Stael, and he was the intimate friend and associate throughout his public life of M. Guizot. His son, the present duke, grew up in an atmosphere of practical religious liberality. It was the law of 1875 ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... clear perception, the scholarly and philosophic tone and decided judgment, which, supplemented by his picturesque description, full of life and color, have given character to his histories. They are features which might well have served to extend the remark of Madame de Stael that a great historian is almost a statesman. I can speak also from my own observation of the reputation which Motley left in the Austrian capital. Notwithstanding the decision with which, under the direction of Mr. Seward, he ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... surveillance of French censors and of the literary spies of Germany in the pay of France. Hormayr's Archives contain a pamphlet well worthy of perusal, in which an account is given of all the arrests and persecutions that took place on account of matters connected with the press.—Madame de Stael was exiled for having spoken favorably of the German character in her work "de l'Allemagne," and the work itself was suppressed; Napoleon, on giving these orders, merely said, ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... are more potent than eloquence or genius without them." They add to beauty, they detract from personal ugliness, they cast a glamour over defects, in short, they work the miracle of mind over matter exemplified in the case of the extremely plain Madame de Stael, who was reputed to "talk herself ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... might say that 'we have not much in common,' if I were only to compare mind to mind, and, when my poor Carry says something less profound than Madame de Stael might have said, smile on her in contempt from the elevation of logic and Latin. Yet, when I remember all the little sorrows and joys that we have shared together, and feel how solitary I should have been without ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... It generally was he who introduced distinguished guests who spoke at the opera house on Decoration Day. He called Mrs. Keller "Mother," and he wasn't above noticing the fit of a gown on a pretty feminine figure. He thought Ivy was an expurgated edition of Lillian Russell, Madame De Stael, and Mrs. Pankburst. ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... aristocratic, for want of a better term. The Chateau Borel, embowered in the trees and thickets of its neglected grounds, had its fame in our day, like the residence of that other dangerous and exiled woman, Madame de Stael, in the Napoleonic era. Only the Napoleonic despotism, the booted heir of the Revolution, which counted that intellectual woman for an enemy worthy to be watched, was something quite unlike the autocracy in mystic vestments, engendered by the slavery of a Tartar ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... the heart being charmed by these qualities is drawn towards the possessor; it desires union with that treasury of virtues and becomes devoted to it. The fruits of this love are expansion of the heart, self-forgetfulness, self-denial. This is true love. Shakespeare, Valmiki, Madame de Stael, are its poets; as Kalidas, Byron, Jayadeva are of the other species of love. The effect on the heart produced by the sight of beauty is dulled by repetition. But love caused by the good qualities of a person does not lose ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... the rooms in this once abode of Royalty, are most splendidly furnished, and decorated with valuable pictures. The likenesses of Madame de Stael, J.J. Rousseau, Cromwell, and Francis I., are ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... the central block of the Mocenigo palace. Venice appealed both to his higher and his lower nature. He set himself to study her history, to understand her constitution, to learn her language. The sights and scenes with which Shakespeare and Otway, Schiller's Ghostseer, and Madame de Stael's Corinne had made him familiar, were before his eyes, not dreams but realities. He would "repeople" her with her own past, and "stamp her image" on the creations of his pen. But he had no one to live for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... of the works selected will at once make it clear that this series is a new departure, and that an attempt is made to provide annotated editions of books which have hitherto been obtainable only in the original French texts. That Madame de Stael, Madame de Girardin, Daniel Stern, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Flaubert, Gautier are among the authors whose works have been selected will leave no doubt as to the literary excellence of the texts included in this series. Works of such quality, ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... intimate knowledge he possessed of his character. Bernadotte was also instigated against Bonaparte by one who not only owed him a personal hatred, but who possessed a mind equal to his, and who gave the Crown Prince both information and advice how to act. This was no less a person than Madame de Stael. It was not, as some have asserted, THAT SHE WAS IN LOVE WITH BERNADOTTE; for, at the time of their intimacy, MADAME DE STAEL WAS IN LOVE WITH ROCCA. But she used her influence (which was not small) with the Crown ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Paris bookseller has contracted to give her a fortune for them. The three greatest—intellectually greatest—women of modern times have lived in France and it is remarkable that they have been three of the most shamelessly profligate in all history. The worst of these, probably—Madame de Stael—left us no records of her long-continued, disgusting, and almost incredible licentiousness, so remarkable that Chateaubriand deemed her the most abandoned person in France at a period when modesty was publicly derided ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... communication between them. Now as the Translators of the Bible, and Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, could not be indebted to Macpherson, it follows that he must have owed his fine feathers to them; unless we are prepared gravely to assert, with Madame de Stael, that many of the characteristic beauties of our most celebrated English Poets are derived from the ancient Fingallian; in which case the modern translator would have been but giving back to Ossian his own.—It is consistent that Lucien Buonaparte, who could censure ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... infirmity of an admirable scholar, who loved the world out of gratitude; who knew where libraries, galleries, architecture, laboratories, savants, and leisure, were to be had, and who did not quite trust the compensations of poverty and nakedness. Socrates loved Athens; Montaigne, Paris; and Madame de Stael said, she was only vulnerable on that side (namely, of Paris). It has its favorable aspect. All the geniuses are usually so ill-assorted and sickly, that one is ever wishing them somewhere else. We seldom ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... a wealthy Spaniard who was the banker of the Spanish Court. The great influence which she unquestionably exerted over her contemporaries was wholly due to her astounding physical beauty. Her intellectual equipment was meagre in the extreme. At one period of her life she courted the society of Madame de Stael and other intellectuals, but Princess Helene Ligne said of her that she "had more jargon than wit." As regards her physical attractions, however, no dissentient voice has ever been raised. "Her beauty," the Duchess d'Abrantes says in her memoirs, "of which the sculptors of antiquity give ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... direct opposition to his counsels, and after gaining the summit, to descend by the other side, and sleep at Schmiedeberg, or some other town in Prussian Silesia. Just, albeit sharp and cutting, is the aphorism of Madame de Stael, that there is no country in the world where the expression, "It is impossible," comes so frequently into use as in Germany. Propose to a German any undertaking which he has either never tried, or which might break through his every-day habits, and he will assure you that the thing ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... unfortunate editor is BOSSUT, not BOSSUET; and if it may appear to some that the difference of one letter in a name is not of much consequence, yet it is from an error as trifling as this that people of my acquaintance confound Madame de Stael with Madame de Staal-Delauney, in spite of chronology and common sense. Again, by the leave of the Christian Remembrancer (vol. xiii. no. 55.), the elegant and accomplished scholar to whom we owe the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... Goethe that "The most unnatural action is yet natural," is a noble suggestion of tolerance; but human judgment can scarcely go to the length of Madame de Stael's opinion, when she claims that "To understand all actions is to pardon all." We must brush away the sophisms which insist that all standards are merely relative, and that time and place alone decide on right and wrong. Were that so, not only all morality, but all science and ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... by which the will of the majority became identified with that necessity which knows no law, contributed further to educate his sense of right in politics, and to augment the distrust of power natural to a pupil of the great Whigs, of Burke, of Montesquieu, of Madame de Stael. On the other hand, as a pupil of Doellinger, his religious faith was deeper than could be touched by the recognition of facts, of which too many were notorious to make it even good policy to deny the rest; and he demanded with passion ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... twice the same. In feature she was commonplace, her form lacked the classic touch, and her raiment was as plain as the plumage of a brown thrush in an autumn hedgerow. She was as homely as George Eliot, Mary Wollstonecraft, Rosa Bonheur, George Sand, or Madame De Stael. No two of the women named looked alike, but I once saw a composite photograph of their portraits and the picture sent no thrills along my keel. Their splendor was a matter of spirit. Have you ever seen the Duse?—there is but one. In repose this woman's ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... moi qui romprait la premiere l'union sacree de nos coeurs; vous le savez bien que ce n'est pas moi, et je rougirais presque, d'assurer ce qui n'est que trop certain.—Corinne, par MADAME DE STAEL. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 363, Saturday, March 28, 1829 • Various
... don't know anything about his books. He doesn't like women to talk about books. He says they only pretend—even the clever ones. Except, of course, Madame de Stael. He can only say she was ugly, and I don't deny it. But I have about used up Madame de Stael,' she added, dropping into another sigh as soft and ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... amusements to look over my various attempts, and to encourage the talent which she fancied I possessed; but now I vainly tried to exert it; my mind was not capable of a continued effort. I believe it is Madame de Stael who remarks (and how truly) that to write one must have suffered, and have struggled; one must have been acquainted with passion and with grief; but they must have passed away from the soul ere the mind can concentrate its powers, and bring its energies to bear ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... then, M. Louis Blanc, editor of the "Revue du Progres," who came near being tried by jury for publishing his "Organization of Labor," and who escaped from the clutches of the public prosecutor only by a juggler's trick; [68] Corinne,—I mean Madame de Stael,—who, in an ode, making a poetical comparison of the land with the waves, of the furrow of a plough with the wake of a vessel, says "that property exists only where man has left his trace," which makes property dependent upon the ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... majority of later French critics, it expressed a sentiment born of the genius of the nation, and made an impression that was only gradually effaced. Marmontel, La Harpe, Marie-Joseph Chenier, and Chateaubriand, in his 'Essai sur Shakespeare,' 1801, inclined to Voltaire's view; but Madame de Stael wrote effectively on the other side in her 'De la Litterature, 1804 (i. caps. 13, 14, ii. 5.) 'At this day,' wrote Wordsworth in 1815, 'the French critics have abated nothing of their aversion to "this darling of our nation." "The English with their bouffon de Shakespeare" is as familiar ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... of his visit to France, and view of the French Revolution; and a great number of other works in which there is cursory mention of different incidents, especially in the earlier part of the Revolution; such as the journals of Arthur Young, Madame de Stael's elaborate treatise on the Revolution; several articles in the last series of the "Causeries de Lundi," by Sainte-Beuve, and others in the Revue des Deux Mondes, etc., etc., and to those may of course be added the regular histories of Lacretelle, Sismondi, ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... prefer "having the cardinal points as her sole garment." "Vetu de climat," says Madame de Stael. In Paris nude statues are "draped in cerulean blue." Rabelais (iv.,29) robes King Shrovetide in grey and gold of a comical cut, nothing before, nothing behind, with sleeves ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... was the kind of conversation that a nice girl invariably uses in putting at ease a jackie whom she has just met at a war recreation dance. Nothing could have been more commonplace or unoriginal, but to Tyler Kamps the brilliance of a Madame de Stael would have sounded ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... conqueror of Gaul might establish a throne upon the ruins of public liberty, he would have instantly repelled the unjust insinuation. Yet Greece fell; Caesar passed the Rubicon, and the patriotic arm even of Brutus could not preserve the liberties of his devoted country. The celebrated Madame de Stael, in her last and perhaps her best work, has said that in the very year, almost the very month, when the president of the Directory declared that monarchy would never show its frightful head in France, Bonaparte with ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... absolute sovereign. He studied the laws of etiquette as closely as he studied the condition of his troops. He saw that the men of the old regime were more conversant in the art of flattery, more eager than the new men. As Madame de Stael says: "Whenever a gentleman of the old court recalled the ancient etiquette, suggested an additional bow, a certain way at knocking at the door of an ante-chamber, a ceremonious method of presenting a despatch, of folding a letter, of concluding it with this or that formula, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... killed that statistical jackass for bothering you; but I'll forgive him, since you say that it's all right. And so ghosts are the only things in the world that frighten you—even though you know that there aren't any. You and Madame de Stael, hey? 'I do not believe in ghosts, but I fear them!' It's pretty painful to learn that the mere sight of one would turn you into a gibbering lunatic. Nice sell for an enthusiastic spirit who'd romped clear back from heaven to give you a pleasant surprise—I don't think! ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... the House of Commons that the rupture of the Peace of Amiens had been brought about by certain essays in the Morning Post, and there is certainly no reason to believe that a tyrant whose animosity against literary or quasi-literary assailants ranged from Madame de Stael down to the bookseller Palm would have regarded a man of Coleridge's reputation in letters as beneath the stoop of ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... before I was twenty, would have it that I was like Rousseau, and Madame de Stael used to say so too in 1813, and the 'Edinburgh Review' has something of the sort in its critique on the fourth canto of 'Childe Harold'. I can't see any point of resemblance:—he wrote prose, I verse: he was of the people; I of the aristocracy: he was a ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... however, to enlarge on the merits of a work which has already obtained so high a reputation. I shall better consult my own advantage in giving a short extract from the animated account of M. SCHLEGEL'S Lectures in the late work on Germany by Madame de Stael:— ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... the chateau, formerly the property of M. Necker, and now the residence of his daughter, Madame de Stael, who will probably be as celebrated in future times for her writings, as her father for the administration of the French finances. I was to have accompanied two friends to a fete given here by Madame de Stael, but unfortunately we did not return in time from ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... and women of genius of the Old World who abused the use of alcohol and opium, were Coleridge, James Thomson, Carew, Sheridan, Steele, Addison, Hoffman, Charles Lamb, Madame de Stael, Burns, Savage, Alfred de Musset, Kleist, Caracci, Jan Steen, Morland Turner (the painter), Gerard de Nerval, Hartley Coleridge, Dussek, Handel, Glueck, Praga, Rovani, and the poet Somerville. This list is by no means complete, as the well-informed reader may see ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... Mecca they were pleased to entitle 'a parish.' Ah" (continued the German with much bonhomie), "it was a pity to see in a great nation so much value attached to such a trifle as money. But what surprised me greatly was the tone of your poetry. Madame de Stael, who knew perhaps as much of England as she did of Germany, tells us that its chief character is the chivalresque; and, excepting only Scott, who, by the way, is not English, I did not find one chivalrous poet among ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... swindling politicians who can see no excellence in knowledge, save as it may minister to their sensual natures, or assist them to cajole the people; while the man who maintains the third, we would recommend to a court of Ladies, with Queen Elizabeth as judge, Madame de Stael as prosecuting attorney, and Hannah More, Mrs. Hemans, and other bright spirits of the same sex, ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... monarch, they have invariably ruined his career. Look at Henry the Fourth and Louis the Fourteenth. They are all ideologists, dreamers, sentimentalists, full of emotion and energy, but without logic or foresight. Look at that accursed Madame de Stael! Look at the Salons of the Quartier St. Germain! Their eternal clack, clack, clack give me more trouble than the fleet of England. Why cannot they look after their babies and their needlework? I suppose you think that these are very ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... success, and though it was performed as late as 1835, the play never struck root in France. It is indeed a play without any real quality or distinction. "Diderot, in his plays," said Madame de Stael, "put the affectation of nature in the place of the affectation of convention."[263] The effect is still more disagreeable in the first kind of affectation than the second. The Father of the Family is made more endurable than The Natural Son by a ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... Madame de Stael was right when she said she greatly preferred meeting interesting men and women to admiring places or scenery. Among my pleasantest memories of Los Angeles are my visits to Madame Fremont in her pretty red cottage, presented by loving friends. It is a privilege ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... strangers—if strangers, why not foreigners?—if foreigners, who so likely as the French? Signor Brunoni spoke broken English like a Frenchman; and, though he wore a turban like a Turk, Mrs Forrester had seen a print of Madame de Stael with a turban on, and another of Mr Denon in just such a dress as that in which the conjuror had made his appearance, showing clearly that the French, as well as the Turks, wore turbans. There could be no doubt Signor Brunoni was a Frenchman—a ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... vague and general, and thence its acknowledged inferiority to the Inferno. But the images of horror are much more powerful than those of happiness; and it is they which have entranced the world. "It is easier," says Madame de Stael, "to convey ideas of suffering than those of happiness; for the former are too well known to every heart, the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... leave, Miss Beaufort, as was her custom, retired for an hour to read in her dressing-room, before she directed her attention to the toilet. She opened a book, and ran over a few pages of Madame de Stael's Treatise on the Passions; but such reasoning was too abstract for her present frame of mind, and she laid ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... the feelings, even of those who, like Madame de Stael and her friend Benjamin Constant, had declared before the coup d'etat that it was necessary to the salvation of the Republic. That accomplished woman was endowed with nearly every attribute of genius except political foresight and self-restraint. No sooner ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... weary of reflecting on the gracious dispensations of Providence towards myself, and its righteous judgments on my neighbors!" Doubtless, God has ordained that sin and folly shall produce suffering, that the consequences may warn us from the causes. Madame de Stael, whose brilliancy, I think, has rather thrown into the shade her very considerable common sense, has well said, "Le secret de l'existence, c'est le rapport de nos peines avec nos fautes." And to acknowledge ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Madame de Stael's words show much insight when she says that only the people who can play with children are able to educate them. For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... qualities than "the nobly pensive St. John!" I might add, that this seat has received, among other visiters, Sir Samuel Romilly, Sir George Beaumont, Sir Humphry Davy—poets as well as philosophers, Madame de Stael, Dugald Stewart, and Christopher ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... experience. Her letters are full of spirit: not always strictly grammatical; not irreproachable in orthography; but vigorous and vivacious. After a lengthened interview with her, an enthusiast exclaimed, "Now do I understand how Goethe has become the man he is!" Wieland, Merck, Buerger, Madame de Stael, Karl August, and other great people sought her acquaintance. The Duchess Amalia corresponded with her as with an intimate friend; and her letters were welcomed eagerly at the Weimar Court. She was married ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... learned how successfully to maintain themselves. We now and here declare the inhumanity, cruelty, and outrage of that father and mother, who pass their daughters into womanhood, having given them no facility for earning their livelihood. Madame de Stael said: "It is not these writings that I am proud of, but the fact that I have facility in ten occupations, in any one of which I could ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... a double hornpipe with Pauline Bonaparte and Madame de Stael; Marshal Soult went down a couple of sets with Madame Recamier; and Robespierre's widow—an excellent, gentle creature, quite unlike her husband—stood up with the Austrian ambassador. Besides, the famous artists Baron Gros, David and Nicholas Poussin, and Canova, who was in town making a statue ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a sound instinct for her art, disfigured though her later writings are by what Madame de Stael called her triste utilite. Her first story is her most artistic production. Castle Rackrent is simply a pleasant satire upon the illiterate and improvident gentry who have always been too common in her country. In this book she holds no ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... man, but a system,' once said, in her most impressive tones, Madame de Stael to Sir James Mackintosh, across a dinner-table. 'Magnificent!' murmured Sir James. 'But what does she mean?' whispered one of those helplessly commonplace creatures who, like the present writer, go about spoiling everything. 'Mass! I cannot tell!' was the frank acknowledgment and apt Shakspearian ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... I said. I did not rate myself with Madame DE STAEL nor with EDWARD FITZGERALD, but I forebore to mention these names because I thought that they would not be familiar to my questioner. If you happen to know Paradise Rents, Fulham, you will realise that neither Madame DE STAEL, nor FITZGERALD is much read there. Moreover, the type that addressed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various |
