s, "She was the best creature in the
world." She had been at some pains to try to bring Lord and Lady Byron
together. She was capable of impressing people with her charm, but
magnetic influence she had none when living, and has left none behind.

Rocca exclaimed, when he heard that she had passed to the shadows,
"What crown could replace that which I have lost!" And the distracted
Benjamin Constant, filled with remorse, reproached himself for some
undefined suffering he had caused her, and did penance all night
through in the death-chamber of his divine Juliet.

This crazy woman seems to have been capricious in everything. She made
and broke liaisons with amazing rapidity while undergoing a compulsory
sojourn at Coppet. She formed there an attachment for the son of a
person named M. Baranti, which very nearly cheated Rocca from becoming
her husband, and the faithless Benjamin Constant from being,
erroneously perhaps, associated with her name as the author of the
manuscript of St. Helen, and she the notoriety of writing "Ten Years
of Exile," which was published after her death.

The youthful Baranti found no scope for his talents at Coppet, and
being offered an inducement to go to the metropolis so that he might
have larger opportunities of advancement, he abandoned the famous
authoress, and she, in loving despair, was seized with the impulse to
immortalise his severance by attempting suicide, and thereby ending
her passion for liaisons, virulence, and fame. The attempt, presumably
feeble, left her long years of mischievous mania for attack on the
supposed author of all her woes. She readily found amongst his enemies
(and thus the enemies of France) those who yearned with her in the
hope she freely and openly expressed that her native land should
suffer defeats, and in this her desire was fully acquiesced in by the
combination of hysterical and purblind Kings, aided by a coterie of
irreconcilables, who welcomed the destruction of their fatherland in
order that the man who had made it the glory and the envy of the world
should be driven from it. Many of these creatures were members of the
same Senate who, a few years previously, sent Napoleon a fervent
address couched in grovelling language, imploring him to cement the
hold his personality had on the national life. The following is what
they say, and what they ask him to do:--"You have brought us out of
the chaos of the past, you have made us bless the benefits of the