i. p. 272). Her book, 'De
l'Allemagne', seized and destroyed by Napoleon, was brought out in June,
1813, by John Murray. Byron thought her
"certainly the cleverest, though not the most agreeable woman he had
ever known. 'She declaimed to you instead of conversing with you,'
said he, 'never pausing except to take breath; and if during that
interval a rejoinder was put in, it was evident that she did not
attend to it, as she resumed the thread of her discourse as though it
had not been interrupted'"
(Lady Blessington's 'Conversations', p. 26). Croker ('Croker Papers',
vol. i. p. 327) describes her as
"ugly, and not of an intellectual ugliness. Her features were coarse,
and the ordinary expression rather vulgar, she had an ugly mouth, and
one or two irregularly prominent teeth, which perhaps gave her
countenance an habitual gaiety. Her eye was full, dark, and
expressive; and when she declaimed, which was almost whenever she
spoke, she looked eloquent, and one forgot that she was plain."
Madame de Stael
"did not affect to conceal her preference for the society of men to
that of her own sex,"
and was entirely above, or below, studying the feminine arts of
pleasing. In 1802 Miss Berry called on her in Paris.
"Found her in an excessively dirty 'cabinet'--sofa singularly so;
her own dress, a loose spencer with a bare neck"
('Journal', vol. ii. p. 145). A similar experience is mentioned by Crabb
Robinson ('Diary', 1804).
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