Excerpt from Madame De Stael, Vol. 1 of 2: A Study of Her Life and Times; The First Revolution and the First Empire I have not been able to find, in any language, anything like an adequate biography of Madame de Stael - a woman who, more than any other, (not excepting Madame Roland) represents her epoch, and that the epoch of the modern history of Europe. The best of French critics, Sainte Beuve, has accorded to her this pre - eminence. How incomplete, ' exclaims Gefl'roy (revue des Deux Mondes, tome vi. Are the biographies of Madame de Stael Her gifted cousin, Madame Necker de Saussure, prepared for the first edition of her collected works (ceuvres Completes de Madame de Stae'l, 17 vols. Paris, 1820 - 21) a Notice on her Character and Writings which is the best memoir of her yet given to the world nearly all the facts of her early life, recorded by other writers, are borrowed from it; yet, of its more than three hundred and seventy pages, seven eighths are devoted to general remarks on hercharacter and critical remarks on her works. She complains of the paucity of her data, the difficulty of constructing a connected history of her friend. The writings of Madame de Sta'el, particularly her Ten Years of Exile, ' her Considerations on the French Revolution, and her sketch of her father introductory to his Manuscripts (a sketch which Benjamin Constant pronounced her best self-reve lation), are replete with allusions to her own life; but these are mostly detached and vague. The superabundant 'memoirs' of her times, and the histories of the French Revolution, of the Litera ture, and of the Society of the epoch, abound in similar allusions, but they seem equally intractable to any attempt to reduce them to the correlation and consistence requisite for a biography of the usual form. Hence, probably, it is that, with almost innumerable biographical sketches, we have as yet no real biography of this greatest of literary women, greatest by the events of her life, if not by her literary productions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.