Item description for 1891 CORINNE ITALY MADAME DE STAEL ISABELL HILL ODES L.E. LANDON AC ARMSTRONG NY

1891 CORINNE or ITALY MADAME DE STAEL ISABELL HILL

ODES L.E. LANDON

AC ARMSTRONG NY

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"CORINNE or ITALY"

BY MADAME DE STAEL

TRANSLATED BY ISABELL HILL

WITH

METRICAL VERSIONS OF THE ODES BY L.E. LANDON

PUBLISHED BY A.C. ARMSTRONG & SONS

51 EAST 10TH STREET, NEAR BROADWAY

NEW YORK, NY

ANTIQUE MANUSCRIPT

HARDCOVER

COVER AND SPINE ARE GOOD

INSEAM IS SHOWING WEAR

396 PAGES

RARE AMERICAN EDITION

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FYI

Anne Louise Germaine de Stael-Holstein (French: [an lwiz ʒɛʁmɛn də stal ɔlstajn]; nee Necker; 22 April 1766 – 14 July 1817), commonly known as Madame de Stael (French: [madam də stal]), was a French woman of letters and political theorist, the daughter of banker and French finance minister Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, a leading salonniere. She was a voice of moderation in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era up to the French Restoration. She was present at the Estates General of 1789 and at the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Her intellectual collaboration with Benjamin Constant between 1794 and 1810 made them one of the most celebrated intellectual couples of their time. She discovered sooner than others the tyrannical character and designs of Napoleon. For many years she lived as an exile – firstly during the Reign of Terror and later due to personal persecution by Napoleon.

In exile, she became the centre of the Coppet group with her unrivalled network of contacts across Europe. In 1814 one of her contemporaries observed that "there are three great powers struggling against Napoleon for the soul of Europe: England, Russia, and Madame de Stael". Known as a witty and brilliant conversationalist, and often dressed in daring outfits, she stimulated the political and intellectual life of her times. Her works, whether novels, travel literature or polemics, which emphasised individuality and passion, made a lasting mark on European thought. De Stael spread the notion of Romanticism widely by its repeated use.

Germaine (or Minette) was the only child of the Swiss governess Suzanne Curchod with aptitude for mathematics and science and prominent Swiss banker and statesman Jacques Necker. He became the Director-General of Finance under King Louis XVI of France and she hosted in Rue de la Chaussee-d'Antin one of the most popular salons of Paris. Mme Necker wanted her daughter educated according to the principles of the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and endow her with the intellectual education and Calvinist discipline instilled in her by her father. On Fridays she regularly brought Germaine as a young child to sit at her feet in her salon, where the guests took pleasure in stimulating the brilliant child. At the age of 13, she read Montesquieu, Shakespeare, Rousseau and Dante. Her parents' social life led to a somewhat neglected and wild Germaine, unwilling to bow to her mother's demands.

Her father "is remembered today for taking the unprecedented step in 1781 of making public the country's budget, a novelty in an absolute monarchy where the state of the national finances had always been kept secret, leading to his dismissal in May of that year." The family eventually took up residence in 1784 at Chateau Coppet, an estate on Lake Geneva. The family returned to the Paris region in 1785.

Marriage

The Swedish Embassy, Hotel de Segur, later Hotel de Salm-Dyck

Aged 11, Germaine had suggested to her mother that she marry Edward Gibbon, a visitor to her salon, whom she found most attractive. Then, she reasoned, he would always be around for her. In 1783, at seventeen, she was courted by William Pitt the Younger and by Comte de Guibert, whose conversation, she thought, was the most far-ranging, spirited and fertile she had ever known. When she did not accept their offers Germaine's parents became impatient. With the help of Marie-Charlotte Hippolyte de Boufflers, a marriage was arranged with Baron Erik Magnus Stael von Holstein, a Protestant and attache of the Swedish legation to France. The wedding took place on 14 January 1786 in the Swedish embassy at 97, Rue du Bac; Germaine was 20, her husband 37. On the whole, the marriage seems to have been workable for both parties, although neither seems to have had much affection for the other. Mlle Necker continued to write miscellaneous works, including the three-act romantic drama Sophie (1786) and the five-act tragedy, Jeanne Grey (1787). The baron, also a gambler, obtained great benefits from the match as he received 80,000 pounds and was confirmed as lifetime ambassador to Paris, although his wife would become almost certainly the more effective envoy.

Revolutionary activities

"Dix Août 1792. Siege et prise du Chateau des Tuileries": French soldiers (volunteers) and citizens storming the Tuileries Palace to capture the royal family and end the monarchy.

In 1788, de Stael published Letters on the works and character of J.J. Rousseau. In this panegyric, written initially for a limited number of friends (in which she considered his housekeeper Therese Levasseur as unfaithful), she demonstrated evident talent, but little critical discernment. De Stael was at this time enthusiastic about the mixture of Rousseau's ideas about love and Montesquieu's on politics.

In December 1788 her father persuaded the king to double the number of deputies at the Third Estate in order to gain enough support to raise taxes to defray the excessive costs of supporting the revolutionaries in America. This approach had serious repercussions on Necker's reputation; he appeared to consider the Estates-General as a facility designed to help the administration rather than to reform the government. In an argument with the king, whose speech on 23 June he didn't attend, Necker was dismissed and exiled on 11 July. Her parents left France on the same day in unpopularity and disgrace. On Sunday, 12 July the news became public, and an angry Camille Desmoulins suggested storming the Bastille. On 16 July he was reappointed; Necker entered Versailles in triumph. His efforts to clean up public finances were unsuccessful and his idea of a National Bank failed. Necker was attacked by Jean-Paul Marat and Count Mirabeau in the Constituante, when he did not agree with using assignats as legal tender. He resigned on 4 September 1790. Accompanied by their son-in-law, her parents left for Switzerland, without the two million livres, half of his fortune, loaned as an investment in the public treasury in 1778.

The increasing disturbances caused by the Revolution made her privileges as the consort of an ambassador an important safeguard. Germaine held a salon in the Swedish embassy, where she gave "coalition dinners", which were frequented by moderates such as Talleyrand and De Narbonne, monarchists (Feuillants) such as Antoine Barnave, Charles Lameth and his brothers Alexandre and Theodore, the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, Pierre Victor, baron Malouet, the poet Abbe Delille, Thomas Jefferson, the one-legged Minister Plenipotentiary to France Gouverneur Morris, Paul Barras (from the Plain) and the Girondin Condorcets. "The issue of leadership, or rather lack of it, was central to de Stael's preoccupations at this stage of her political reflections. She experienced the death of Mirabeau, accused of royalism, as a sign of great political disorientation and uncertainty. He was the only man with the necessary charisma, energy, and prestige to keep the revolutionary movement on a path of constitutional reform."

Following the 1791 French legislative election, and after the French Constitution of 1791 was announced in the National Assembly, she resigned from a political career and decided not to stand for re-election. "Fine arts and letters will occupy my leisure." She did, however, play an important role in the succession of Comte de Montmorin the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and in the appointment of Narbonne as minister of War and continued to be centre stage behind the scenes. Marie Antoinette wrote to Hans Axel Fersen: "Count Louis de Narbonne is finally Minister of War, since yesterday; what a glory for Mme de Stael and what a joy for her to have the whole army, all to herself." In 1792 the French Legislative Assembly saw an unprecedented turnover of ministers, six ministers of the interior, seven ministers of foreign affairs, and nine ministers of war. On 10 August 1792 Clermont-Tonnere was thrown out of a window of the Louvre Palace and trampled to death. De Stael offered baron Malouet a plan of escape for the royal family. As there was no government, militant members of the Insurrectionary Commune were given extensive police powers from the provisional, executive council, " to detain, interrogate and incarcerate suspects without anything resembling due process of law". She helped De Narbonne, dismissed for plotting, to hide under the altar in the chapel in the Swedish embassy, and lectured the sans-culottes from the section in the hall.

On Sunday 2 September, the day the Elections for the National Convention and the September massacres began, she fled herself in the garb of an ambassadress. Her carriage was stopped and the crowd forced her into the Paris town hall, where Robespierre presided. That same evening she was conveyed home, escorted by the procurator Louis Pierre Manuel. The next day the commissioner to the Commune of Paris Jean-Lambert Tallien arrived with a new passport and accompanied her to the edge of the barricade.

Legacy

Albertine Necker de Saussure, married to de Stael's cousin, wrote her biography in 1821, published as part of the collected works. Auguste Comte included Mme de Stael in his 1849 Calendar of Great Men. Her political legacy has been generally identified with a stout defence of "liberal" values: equality, individual freedom, and the limitation of state power by constitutional rules. "Yet although she insisted to the Duke of Wellington that she needed politics in order to live, her attitude towards the propriety of female political engagement varied: at times she declared that women should simply be the guardians of domestic space for the opposite sex, while at others, that denying women access to the public sphere of activism and engagement was an abuse of human rights. This paradox partly explains the persona of the “homme-femme” she presented in society, and it remained unresolved throughout her life."

Comte's disciple Frederic Harrison wrote about de Stael that her novels "precede the works of Walter Scott, Byron, Mary Shelley, and partly those of Chateaubriand, their historical importance is great in the development of modern Romanticism, of the romance of the heart, the delight in nature, and in the arts, antiquities, and history of Europe."

Precursor of feminism

Recent studies by historians, including feminists, have been assessing the specifically feminine dimension in de Stael's contributions both as an activist-theorist and as a writer about the tumultuous events of her time. She has been called a precursor of feminism.

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