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...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...
...Mischievous intriguer," "raven," "rascal,"-so Emperor Napoleon called Germaine de Staël, who became almost an obsessional hatred. When Mme. de Staël wrote her famed romance, Corinne, in 1807, the Emperor noted angrily that Corinne's heroine was English and its hero Scottish. He exploded: "I cannot forgive Mme. de Staël for having disparaged the French people." She was already banished from Napoleon's capital; when she appealed to return, he made her exile perpetual and ordered that she might not approach closer to Paris than 40 French leagues (100 miles...
Stoking Napoleon's hatred was the fact that flamboyant, liberty-loving Mme. de Staël had been one of the first to suspect his despotic ambitions. As France's First Consul, Napoleon had guessed, quite rightly, that Mme. de Staël "wanted to put him on guard against himself" and to play the part of mistress-adviser to him. But the Consul already had his eye on sylphish Juliette Récamier, wife of a Paris banker, had sent Minister Joseph Fouché to whisper in her ear: "The First Consul finds you charming." When, after...
Flowery Charms. "Weak" was hardly the word for either creature. Mme. de Staël was a carthorse Juno with a passionate imagination: she could talk for hours on any given subject without pausing to breathe. Her lovers were so numerous that they ran concurrently, like prison sentences. Mme. Récamier, on the other hand, was bright and lovely as a peacock and quick as a lizard at dodging through chinks. "She liked to stop everything in April," said Critic Sainte-Beuve with French delicacy-meaning that Mme. Récamier drove men half-crazy by drawing them hopelessly...
...eyes and smiles shyly, as if filled with gratitude and the sense of his own unworthiness. And when he meets the European Woman (Elisabeth Mueller). the young wolf of Wall Street stands there with his tail between his legs, like an Iowa farm boy suddenly confronted with Madame de Staël. The lady is obviously intelligent, or so the scriptwriter seems to think, because she never stops talking. She must be cultured because she pounds incessantly on a piano. And she has certainly known life because-as she informs the hero in the first few minutes of their acquaintance...