'Canning's New Morality', lines 293-301 (Edmonds' edition of the 'Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin', pp. 282, 283).
Anne Louise Germaine Necker (1766-1817), only child of the Minister Necker and his wife Suzanne Curchod, Gibbon's early love, married, in 1786, the Swedish Ambassador Baron de Staël Holstein, who died in 1802. She married, as her second husband, in 1811, M. de Rocca, a young French officer, who had been severely wounded in Spain, but survived her by a year (Madame de Récamier, 'Souvenirs', vol. 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."
"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).
"On the 28th of January," he writes, "I first waited on Madame de Staël. I was shown into her bedroom, for which, not knowing Parisian customs, I was unprepared. She was sitting, most decorously, 'in' her bed, and writing. She had her night-cap on, and her face was not made up for the day. It was by no means a captivating spectacle; but I had a very cordial reception, and two bright black eyes smiled benignantly on me."