rt a hymn and all would chime in until
the contestants were drowned out and in token of submission joined in the
chorus.

But Madame De Stael was very busy all these days. Her house was filled
with refugees, and she ran here and there for passports and pardons, and
beseeched ministers and archbishops for interference or assistance or
amnesty or succor and all those things that great men can give or bestow
or effect or filch. And when her smiles failed to win the wished-for
signature, she still had tears that would move a heart of brass.

About this time Baron De Stael fades from our vision, leaving with Madame
three children.

"It was never anything but a 'mariage de convenance' anyway, what of it ?"
and Madame bursts into tears and throws herself into Farquar's arms.

"Compose yourself, my dear--you are spoiling my gown," says the Duchesse.

"I stood him as long as I could," continued Madame.

"You mean he stood you as long as he could."

"You naughty thing!--why don't you sympathize with me?"

Then both women fall into a laughing fit that is interrupted by the
servant, who announces Benjamin Constant.

Constant came as near winning the love of Madame De Stael as any man ever
did. He was politician, scholar, writer, orator, courtier. But with it all
he was a boor, for when he had won the favor of Madame De Stael he wrote a
long letter to Madame Charriere, with whom he had lived for several years
in the greatest intimacy, giving reasons why he had forsaken her, and
ending with an ecstacy in praise of the Stael.

If a man can do a thing more brutal than to humiliate one woman at the
expense of another, I do not know it. And without entering any defense for
the men who love several women at one time, I wish to make a clear
distinction between the men who bully and brutalize women for their own
gratification and the men who find their highest pleasure in pleasing
women. The latter may not be a paragon, yet as his desire is to give
pleasure, not to corral it, he is a totally different being from the man
who deceives, badgers, humiliates, and quarrels with one who can not
defend herself, in order that he may find an excuse for leaving her.

A good many of Constant's speeches were written by Madame De Stael, and
when they traveled together through Germany he no doubt was a great help
to her in preparing the "De l'Allemagne."

But there was a little man approaching from out the mist of obscurity who
was to play an