was loved by a man of action, and she
tired of him very soon. She had a wonderful reputation for her
knowledge of history and philosophy, and yet what she knew of those
subjects is now seen to be merely the scraps and borrowings of others.

Something she did when she introduced the romantic literature into
France; and there are passages from her writings which seem worthy of
preservation. For instance, we may quote her outburst with regard to
unhappy marriages. "It was the subject," says Mr. Gribble, "on which
she had begun to think before she was married, and which continued to
haunt her long after she was left a widow; though one suspects that the
word 'marriage' became a form of speech employed to describe her
relations, not with her husband, but with her lovers." The passage to
which I refer is as follows:

In an unhappy marriage, there is a violence of distress surpassing all
other sufferings in the world. A woman's whole soul depends upon the
conjugal tie. To struggle against fate alone, to journey to the grave
without a friend to support you or to regret you, is an isolation of
which the deserts of Arabia give but a faint and feeble idea. When all
the treasure of your youth has been given in vain, when you can no
longer hope that the reflection of these first rays will shine upon the
end of your life, when there is nothing in the dusk to remind you of
the dawn, and when the twilight is pale and colorless as a livid
specter that precedes the night, your heart revolts, and you feel that
you have been robbed of the gifts of God upon earth.

Equally striking is another prose passage of hers, which seems less the
careful thought of a philosopher than the screeching of a termagant. It
is odd that the first two sentences recall two famous lines of Byron:

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;
'Tis woman's whole existence.

The passage by Mme. de Stael is longer and less piquant:

Love is woman's whole existence. It is only an episode in the lives of
men. Reputation, honor, esteem, everything depends upon how a woman
conducts herself in this regard; whereas, according to the rules of an
unjust world, the laws of morality itself are suspended in men's
relations with women. They may pass as good men, though they have
caused women the most terrible suffering which it is in the power of
one human being to inflict upon another. They may be regarded as loyal,
though they have betrayed them. They may have re