magician was Love. Years previously, when Sismondi had himself been in love in his decorous fashion, and had reproached Madame de Staël for a want of sympathy in his trouble—a want which he had not expected in the author of Delphine—she said to him: "I have never loved that I have not felt in myself two persons—one who laughed at the other." But when she made that answer she was young and restless, and, like all great and burning minds, claimed from life a destiny too radiant to be ever realised. Now she was middle-aged; she had drunk of the waters of bitterness and known some of the tragic awakenings of passion; she had experienced an immeasurable sorrow in the loss of her father; she had become familiar to satiety with the triumphs of the world; and was, as she wrote to Madame Récamier, "wearied of suffering." In short, the moment had come when the one imperious cry of her soul was for peace. In such a state of mind what seems ridiculous becomes possible, and the spirit of mocking youth in Madame de Staël, which once could laugh at the passionate half of her nature, was buried with most of her hopes and almost all of her illusions.
It was shortly after her return to Switzerland that, going to Geneva to spend some little while, she first met Rocca. He was twenty-three, she was forty-five; but that disparity of years did not prevent his conceiving for her a most romantic passion. He was extremely handsome—a fact to which Frederica Brun and Byron alike bear witness, and was further interesting through having been wounded in the war in Spain, and so badly that his health was never restored. He was the son of a Councillor of State in Geneva, and descended from a noble Piedmontese family which had
