fetters, he had obtained the companionship of a certain Madame de Rodde, whom Madame de Staël described, with some asperity, as a "fat German."
But she separated from the philosopher still quite charmed with his appreciation of the good and true, and not in the least repulsed by his ways. On the contrary, she wrote to him shortly afterwards, reproaching him passionately with his silence. One can imagine how absurd such exactions must have seemed to the good Villers, with his head full of Kant and Madame de Rodde to attend to his comforts; but the truth was that Madame de Staël's mood just then caused her to make herself needlessly miserable about everything. To Mathieu de Montmorency she wrote that she was filled with terror, and fancied that death must shortly overtake her father, children, friends, everybody dear to her.
She seemed to forget entirely that it was her own choice which had taken her to Germany; Napoleon had banished her merely from Paris; and there was nothing to prevent her returning to Coppet to soothe the last years and enjoy the conversation of her venerated father. But this did not suit her; she required a wider intellectual horizon and more varied society.
For many reasons, some of them dependent on the political bias of monarchical writers, it has been the fashion to proclaim Madame de Staël's opposition to Napoleon as inspired by pure hatred of despotism. To us this does not seem quite a correct version. If it were, Madame de Staël would have been a totally different person; colder, less impulsively benevolent, less thoroughly womanly. All through her life her conduct was determined by her feeling towards indi-
