epened into a
positive, definite, and earnest Christianity, but without mysticism
and without intolerance. Some beautiful lines that are cited by Lady
Blennerhassett very faithfully express the spirit of her belief: 'Il
faut avoir soin, si l'on peut, que le declin de cette vie soit la
jeunesse de l'autre. Se desinteresser de soi, sans cesser de
s'interesser aux autres, met quelque chose de divin dans l'ame.'

She lived to see the downfall of perhaps the only man she really
hated, his return from Elba, his final defeat at Waterloo, and the
restoration of the Bourbons. But, though she detested Napoleon and his
system, these things gave her no pleasure. The spectacle of an invaded
and a dismembered France aroused her strongest feelings of patriotism,
and she loved liberty too truly and too ardently to rejoice in the
influences that triumphed in 1815. Her last years were chiefly spent
in the composition of her 'Considerations on the French Revolution,'
in which she sums up the convictions of her life. It is one of her
most valuable and most lasting books. The disproportioned prominence
which is naturally assigned in it to Necker, and the manifest personal
element in her antipathy to Napoleon, impair its weight, indeed, as a
history; but few writers have criticised with more justice the
successive stages of the Revolution, and few books of its generation
are so rich in political wisdom. The concluding chapters, in which, in
a strain of noble eloquence, she pleads the cause of moderate and
constitutional freedom, show how steadily and how strongly, in an age
of many disenchantments, she clung to the belief of her youth.

The 'Considerations on the French Revolution' had a vast and an
immediate success, and in a few days sixty thousand copies were sold.
Madame de Stael, however, did not live to witness her triumph. In
February 1817 she was struck down by a paralytic illness, and on July
14, after a long period of complete prostration, she passed away
tranquilly in her sleep. It was a peaceful ending to an agitated and
chequered career. She had enjoyed much and suffered much. She had
committed grave faults, and had met with her full share of
disappointment and ingratitude; but few women have left such an
enduring monument behind them, or have touched human life on so many
sides and with so many sympathies.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] There is also an English, and somewhat abridged, translation.

THE PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE OF