Perhaps the reason of it is that one divines in her at this time a sentiment which, if erring, was simple and true, while many of her later sorrows gained a kind of factitious grandeur from the train of political circumstances attendant on them. Mrs. Phillips was present when Madame de Staël received the letter which summoned her to rejoin her husband at Coppet, and relates the effect produced upon her. She was most frankly inconsolable, spoke again and again of her sorrow at going, and made endless entreaties to Mrs. Phillips to attend to the wants, spirits, and affairs of the friends whom she was leaving. She even charged her with a message of forgiveness for the ungrateful Fanny, and fairly sobbed when parting with Mrs. Folk.
Madame de Staël did not leave Coppet again until after the Revolution. Her life seems to have passed with a monotony that the long drama of horror slowly culminating in Paris rendered tragically sombre. She continued her efforts—every day more difficult of accomplishment and sterile of results—to save her friends and foes; and when the Queen was arraigned, she wrote, in a few days, that eloquent and well-known defence of her which called down upon the writer the applause of every generous heart in Europe.
The Neckers during this period seem to have seen very little society. Gibbon was almost their only friend; and in 1794 he went to England, and a few months later died. The next to go was Madame Necker herself. She had long been ill, and her last few months of life were embittered by cruel pain. She had prepared for her end with the minute and morbid care that might have been expected from her. The tomb at Coppet in which she rests, together with her husband and daughter, was built in conformity with
