PREFACE.
Unpublished correspondence—that delight of the eager biographer—is not to be had in the case of Madame de Staël, for, as is well known, the De Broglie family either destroyed or successfully hid all the papers which might have revealed any facts not already in possession of the world.
The writer of the present brief memoir has, consequently, had to fall back upon the following well-known works:
The Correspondance of the Abbé Galiani, of Mme. Du Deffand, of Rahel Varnhagen, and of Schiller; the Memoirs of Marmontel, of Mme. D'Arblay, of Mme. de Rémusat, of Mme. d'Abrantès, of Bourrienne, and of the Comte de Montlosier; Ticknor's Letters; Châteaubriand's Mémoires d'Outre Tombe; De Goncourt's Histoire de la Société Française pendant la Révolution, and Histoire de la Société Française pendant le Directoire; Lacretelle's Dix Années d'Épreuve; Michelet's Le Directoire, Le Dix-huit Brumaire, and Jusqu'à Waterloo; Le Salon de Madame Necker, by Vicomte d'Haussonville; Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, by Vernon Lee; Byron's Letters;
