of favoring
intrigues, and, seeing the plots of the Royalists, she adopted a new
plan in her salon; politics being too dangerous, she decided to devote
herself more to literature. In her book _Les Passions_ she endeavored
to crush her calumniators; she wrote: "Condemned to celebrity, without
being able to be known I find need of making myself known by my
writings."

It was not safe for her to return to Paris until 1797, when her friend
Talleyrand was made minister of foreign affairs. Her efforts to charm
Napoleon led only to estrangement, although he appointed her friend
Benjamin Constant to the tribunate; but when he publicly announced the
advent of the tyrant Napoleon, she was accused of inciting her friends
against the government, and was again banished to Coppet, where she
wrote the celebrated work _De la Litterature Consideree sous ses
Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales_, a singular mixture of
satirical allusions to Napoleon's government and cabals against
his power; in that work she announced, also, her belief in the
regeneration of French literature by the influence of foreign
literature, and endeavored to show the relations which exist between
political institutions and literature. Thus, she was the first
to bring the message of a general cosmopolitan relationship of
literatures and literary ideas.

In 1802 she returned to Paris and began to show, on every possible
occasion, a morbid hatred for Napoleon. When her father published his
work _Dernieres Vues de Politique et de Finance_, expressing a desire
to write against the tyranny of one, after having fought so long that
of the multitude, the emperor immediately accused Mme. de Stael of
instilling these ideas into her father. Her salon and forty of her
friends were put into the interdict.

After the death of her husband in 1802, she was free to marry Benjamin
Constant; and after refusing him, she wrote her novel _Delphine_ to
give vent to her feelings. The two famous lines found in almost every
work on Mme. de Stael may be quoted here, as they well express her
ideas on marriage: "A man must know how to brave an opinion, and a
woman must submit to it." This qualification Benjamin Constant lacked,
and at that time she was unable to give the submission.

Her travels in Germany, Russia, and Italy were one great succession of
triumphs; by her brilliancy, her wonderful gift of conversation, and
her quickness of comprehension, she everywhere baffled and astou