Word: sta
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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MISTRESS TO AN AGE, by J. Christopher Herold. Germaine de Staël back again in a first-rate biography of the woman who rode the French Revolution like a balky horse, managed, without beauty or other feminine graces, to capture as lovers many of the foremost men of her day. Napoleon said no, and that may have been his major mistake...
...title of this biography puts both the author's point of view and his heroine in a nutshell-quite an achievement, considering that Germaine de Staël was probably the largest, loudest, lustiest woman who ever strode the pages of French history. Riding the great waves of social upheaval during and after the Revolution, Germaine exhausted her lovers, exasperated her friends, maddened her rulers...
...fact remains that when Europe lived in terror and tyranny, the household of dauntless Germaine de Staël earned the honor of being regarded (in Stendhal's words) as "the Grand Assizes of European opinion...
...father was Jacques Necker, Louis XVI's famed moneyman, who virtually ran France. At 19, Germaine was married off to Sweden's Baron Eric Magnus de Staël-Holstein in a deal of unromantic grandeur under which 1) France gave Sweden the West Indian island of Saint-Barthélemy, 2) the King of Sweden gave Baron de Staël, who had rigged the gift, the plum post of Ambassador to Paris, 3) Banker Necker, who had refused to settle for a son-in-law below ambassadorial rank, gave daughter Germaine to Ambassador de Sta...
...agonizing passion she knew but the quiet happiness that eluded her." She pursued ideals with equal passion, but always with the hope that she might "agree peacefully" with enthusiasts whose ideals were different. Thus, concludes Biographer Herold in one of the odd conclusions-of-the-month, Mme. de Staël's example is of immense value today in a world which is full of fanaticism and "mesmerized by the opposition of principles...