fterward.

Possibly there are hasty people who imagine they detect tincture of iron
somewhere in these pages: these good people will say, "Gracious me! why
not?"

And so I will at once admit that these respectable, well-arranged, and
carefully planned marriages are often happy and peaceful.

The couple may "raise" a large family and slide through life and out of it
without a splash. I will also admit that love does not necessarily imply
happiness--more often 't is a pain, a wild yearning, and a vague unrest; a
haunting sense of heart-hunger that drives a man into exile repeating
abstractedly the name "Beatrice! Beatrice!" And so all the moral I will
make now is simply this: the individual who has not known an all-absorbing
love has not the spiritual vision that is a passport to Paradise. He
forever yammers between the worlds, fit for neither Heaven nor Hell.

* * * * *

Necker retired from business that he might enjoy peace; his daughter
married for the same reason. It was stipulated that she should never be
separated from her father. She who stipulates is lost, so far as love
goes--but no matter! Married women in France are greater lions in society
than maidens can possibly hope to be. The marriage-certificate serves at
once as a license for brilliancy, daring, splendor, and it is also a badge
of respectability. The marriage-certificate is a document that in all
countries is ever taken care of by the woman and never by the man.

And this document is especially useful in France, as French dames know.
Frenchmen are afraid of an unmarried woman--she means danger, damages, a
midnight marriage and other awful things. An unmarried woman in France can
not hope to be a social leader; and to be a social leader was the one
ambition of Madame De Stael.

It was called the salon of Madame De Stael now. Baron De Stael was known
as the husband of Madame De Stael. The salon of Madame Necker was only a
matter of reminiscence. The daughter of Necker was greater than her
father, and as for Madame Necker, she was a mere figure in towering
headdress, point lace and diamonds. Talleyrand summed up the case when he
said, "She is one of those dear old things that have to be tolerated."

Madame De Stael had a taste for literature from early womanhood. She
wrote beautiful little essays and read them aloud to her company, and her
manuscripts had a circulation like unto her father's bank-notes. She had
the fa