SOURCE: “Communication and Power in Germaine de Staël: Transparency and Obstacle,” in Germaine de Staël: Crossing the Borders, edited by Madelyn Gutwirth, Avriel Goldberger, and Karyna Szmurlo, Rutgers University Press, 1991, pp. 55-68.

[In the following essay, Bowman considers the problem of communication in de Staël's writing.]

One of the results of absolute power which most contributed to Napoleon's downfall was that, bit by bit, no one dared any longer tell him the truth about anything. He ended up unaware that winter arrived in Moscow in November because none of his courtiers was Roman enough to tell him something even that simple.¹

Because of this remark, and many others like it, I shall try to present here an overall view of a major problem in Staël's writing, which she never analyzes in a systematic way, but where her thought is very rich: how communication is impeded or interrupted by silence, lying, hypocrisy, the debasement of language.² We tend, incorrectly, to associate the problematics of language and communication solely with the crisis of modernity; they were also of great concern for the Groupe de Coppet. The problem is linguistic, but also moral and political, and Staël discusses it in all her various sorts of writing. My goal is in part to demonstrate the homogeneity of her thought as novelist, critic, philosopher, and political theoretician. For lack of space, I shall have to be schematic; the subject merits a book.

Adelaide and Theodore, an early work, (1786), prefigures in many ways the obstacles to communication typical of Staël's later writings. Adelaide is secretly married to Theodore. His mother's opposition makes declaring that marriage impossible. Because a friend of hers is in love with Count d’Elmont, Adelaide often entertains d’Elmont; Theodore is understandably jealous, but she cannot betray her friend's secret. She becomes pregnant, but does not dare tell Theodore, whence the crisis scene:

Adelaide, who was on the point of telling him about the new tie between them, was deeply wounded by his coldness, and so kept silent. They moved toward each other, their secrets were about to be revealed, but some strange eagerness for unhappiness imposed silence, and Theodore rushed off with the painful cry, “Adelaide, adieu.”³

She runs after him, shouting, but “her voice could not be heard.” He falls fatally ill with pulmonary trouble (other heroes get wounded in the chest, all interfering with speech). She goes to see him, but in hiding, does not even dare ask where he is. When they do get together, his mother arrives, and she can say nothing. Theodore dies, and Adelaide stays alive long enough to bear their child and then commits suicide. She does leave her son an autobiographical text which tells all, but when communication is finally established, the protagonists are all dead. Otherwise, communication fails throughout the text, and each failure produces a new disaster.

The plot is quite similar to that of Delphine but, as Simone Balayé has shown, Delphine is also a political novel in which communication is impeded not only because of the amorous plot but also because of political and social factors and because of woman's status.⁴ Staël was the first woman to obtain fame in France not only as a novelist but as an essayist, in philosophy, esthetics, history, and politics. In all these areas she is concerned with the problem of communication.

DESPOTISM AS AN OBSTACLE TO COMMUNICATION

The clearest case is that represented by my opening quotation about Napoleon and the Moscow winters. Political theoreticians, from Machiavelli to Max Weber and Erving Goffmann, have lengthily analyzed how the possession of power prevents effective communication. It is one of Staël's major criticisms of Napoleon: “The fear he created was such that no one dared tell him the truth about anything.”⁵ She also faults the ancien régime for the same reason, as she does the first Restoration; even a simple Swiss peasant knew that Napoleon was apt to return, but court etiquette and ministerial pretensions were such that no one could state the obvious.⁶ There are historical exceptions: Louis XII, Henri IV with his attacks on flattery, the English—who are “as truthful about their failures as about their successes,”⁷ but generally despotism produces flattery, and he who is flattered cannot know the truth.⁸ The Duke of Mendoce in Delphine is a nice satirical portrait of such a flatterer, and the play Jane Grey offers several others, but one could say that in Delphine salon life is similarly vitiated by the despotism of opinion. Staël's thinking here is hardly original, except in two respects. One is her thesis that the obstacles despotism poses to communication can be remedied by the use of allegory or the fantastic, stating the truth in a veiled manner.⁹ The other is that, despite flattery, the truth will out, history will destroy the lie, it will snow in Moscow in November.¹⁰ I leave aside the related but well-known matter of her opposition to censorship to discuss how political abuse of language can create obstacles to communication.

THE DEBASEMENT OF LANGUAGE

Staël is primarily concerned here with two phenomena: the abuse of revolutionary language during the Terror and the problem of calumny—of which women, including Marie Antoinette and Staël herself, are particularly victims. But she reflects the same concern with the debasement of language in her discussion of what we have referred to since Heidegger as “inauthentic discourse,” in salon life as well as elsewhere. Here she is a precursor of Flaubert: the abuse of language deprives words of their proper meaning and results in a reversal of moral values, where virtue becomes associated with the weak and duped, vice with the strong.¹¹ Calumny and revolutionary eloquence “deprive words of their natural power and reason, exhausted by error and sophistry, can no longer perceive the truth” (On Literature 405). On Literature contains a long and violent attack against revolutionary eloquence, which abuses the names of all the virtues to justify every crime (407-409). In a close analysis of a sentence by Couthon, she shows how it is well organized and logically constructed, but only to the end that reason can become the arm of crime. And here, in contrast to what happens with flattery, history tends to espouse and realize the abuse of language. These false ideas, dressed up in exaggerated images, lead to the most sanguinary furies; all proper judgment is destroyed.¹² Words that are so abused become arid and powerless to move, and the language of liberty particularly loses that power.¹³ A special study should be made of Staël's proposals for controlling calumny, where she and Constant had some trouble reconciling their hatred of libel with their love of the freedom of the press. But the main problem for her was that words and eloquence, which should be instruments of freedom, had become the instruments of terror and oppression. As an example of her deep concern, I cite one of the few really cruel passages she ever wrote, about Robespierre's death. “His jaw was smashed by a pistol shot; he could not even talk to defend himself, he who had talked so much in order to destroy others! One might say that divine justice does not refuse, when it wishes, to strike the imagination by powerfully moving circumstances” (Considerations 315).

Under Napoleon, matters became worse in the sense that he not only censored the press and speech but also created a controlled press that spewed forth lies and falsehoods, creating “a despotism which took its delights in language” (Circumstances 294). Napoleon manipulated language, indulged in the “active lie.”¹⁴ He practiced political dissimulation not by silence but by floods of words; it is easier to mislead by speaking, by lying actively, than by silence.¹⁵ To the tyranny of gossip he added the gossip of tyranny.¹⁶ And this abuse of language, created by the Revolution and intensified by Napoleonic despotism, she felt, was now invading all forms of discourse; one can only learn what it is safe to say, and not what is.¹⁷

THE TREATISE ON GOOD ELOQUENCE

A contemporary reader is astonished by the importance Staël attributes to eloquence in On Literature, but for her, eloquence is a necessary and indispensable political instrument badly in need of rehabilitation. And Staël, a firm believer in perfectibility, does not despair; indeed, with progress in literacy and democracy good eloquence will become more and more necessary, for “reason and eloquence are the natural links of any republican association.”¹⁸ Her recipe for rehabilitating the eloquence that the Revolution and Napoleon had perverted is a simple one; one must have recourse to reason, imagination, and sentiment, and the three must be harmoniously combined.¹⁹ The spread of printing, as opposed to oral communication, has made right reason even more essential: geometric precision and logical ordering are required when the text can be read closely and reexamined.²⁰ But truth and the ornaments of truth must be effectively combined, expression and sentiment derived from the same source.²¹ Also, one must be brave and dare to speak the truth. Notably, truth is for Staël necessary not only in political discourse but also in the novel, a theory she has already developed in Essay on Fiction; fiction must also harmoniously combine reason, sentiment, and imagination.²²

But the task is not a simple one, and we must make a detour here to discuss another problem.

THE POWERS AND DANGERS OF THE IRONIC WIT OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Eighteenth-century authors, particularly Voltaire, says Staël, employed “an allegorical manner of expressing the truth effectively in an age when error reigned.”²³On Literature offers an interesting historical explanation for this phenomenon in France. The power of the French monarchy was limitless in fact but uncertain and limited in principle (droit). Power could be arbitrary, but at the same time liberty of thought and expression was both possible and necessary when it took the form of wit and even ridicule, and could contribute to the progressive struggle against error and oppression. This wit is peculiarly French: in Russia, the nobility is too uneducated, the government too despotic; in Italy, again for political reasons, wit can only deal with matters of love, esthetics, and so forth; in Germany, people are too concerned with the truth to practice wit; in England, there are no intermediate conversational bodies between the family and Parliament where wit could find political play.²⁴

Elsewhere, however, Staël can be quite negative about this ironic wit, which is too often used to attack behavior that does not conform to social norms. The “noble simplicity” that should characterize speech in a republic has been replaced by this clattering of syllables, the product of despotism. It is a discourse of vanity and not of energy. In the novels it is often the weapon of slander.²⁵ More interestingly, she associates language of this sort with that “metaphysic which links all our ideas to our sensations.” Staël is convinced to the contrary, that the superficial comes from outside impressions, serious discourse reflects the depths of the soul.²⁶ Her rejection of eighteenth-century wit is connected with her option for transcendental rather than sensualist or ideological philosophy. But that choice raises another question.

IS A PURELY TRANSPARENT LANGUAGE POSSIBLE?

Staël associated Transcendentalism first and foremost with Kant, including the categorical imperative and the Kantian injunction to refuse lying in all its forms. Kant, as she notes, respected truth to the point where one should not even lie when a scoundrel asks you if your friend whom he is pursuing is hidden in your house.²⁷ Staël concluded, in the context of the Terror suggested by the above example, that there are occasions when one must lie in order to protect others, whence her preference for Jacobi over Kant, for a somewhat flexible ethics inspired by religious sentiment over logical rigorism.²⁸ Delphine echoes this debate in her preference for religion as opposed to honor as the ethical principle. In ethics, Staël, a novelist, thinks about concrete, not abstract situations, as she does in politics, and concludes that good must often compromise with evil.²⁹ It is noteworthy in this respect that, in her essay on Rousseau, she does not praise his claim of absolute sincerity in his Confessions. Her minor literary texts are full of “white lies”; indeed Jane Grey's excellence stems from her lying about her political attitudes, from the lie she tells in order to save her husband's life, and M. de Kernadec is all about the invention of a rather preposterous white lie so that crossed lovers can be married. Elsewhere, she is more ambiguous. Her comments on Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse on the one hand admire Julie's refusal to tell all to M. de Wolmar, but then she adds, “How I should appreciate a movement which would lead her to reveal everything.”³⁰ Her Story of Pauline offers an exemplary illustration of this ambiguity. Mme de Verneuil, who is good, encourages Pauline to lie in order to get out of the clutches of her seducer and start a new life, then to lie about her past in order to marry her true love, Edouard; but when Edouard does discover the past, the result is a duel where he is fatally wounded. The text concludes that what most caused his despair was Pauline's silence about her past failings.³¹ In the same way, in Delphine the “white lie” is usually the lie of silence—Léonce about his would-be assassins, Delphine about her political opinions, about the love of Thérèse d’Ervins for M. de Serbellane, about her gifts to Matilde, and her refusal, at Barton's suggestion, to tell Léonce what she has discovered about Mme de Vernon. But many of these lies of silence, while morally justified, eventually produce disaster; Delphine's silence about Thérèse, for instance, leads Léonce to marry Matilde. The absolute refusal to lie demanded by Kant is then not only impossible, but can even be immoral. When one must lie, it is best to lie by silence, and even then the “virtuous” lie exacts a price of suffering. Nor was Staël unaware that almost everyone thinks that his or her lie is virtuous; Mme de Vernon gives a rather good speech to that effect on her deathbed.

ENGLISH ELOQUENCE AND LUCILE'S SILENCE

The Anglophilia which dominates much of Staël's thought is less strong when it comes to the problem of communication. On the one hand she admires the seriousness of English political discourse, the fairness of legal eloquence, the absence of a declamatory style and of sophistry.³² On the other, she not only criticizes, as noted above, the absence of political discussions outside Parliament, but above all she deplores the silence that women in England are reduced to. They do not participate in discussions, creating a lack of general conversation, of familiarity.³³Corinne offers an ample case study of this English failing, not only with Lady Edgermond but with Edgermond himself and above all with Lucile. Lucile's refusal to tell Oswald about the dangers of crossing the Alps is all too reminiscent of the courtiers' refusal to tell Napoleon about the November weather in Moscow. Staël interestingly (if incorrectly) complains that in England there are no memoirs, confessions, autobiographical literature; a too severe refusal to talk about the self vitiates English literature.³⁴ According to Staël, silence, particularly the silence imposed on women in England, is not golden.

THE FORMS OF IMPEDED COMMUNICATION

I should now like to propose a categorization of the forms of impeded communication in Staël's texts, though I must admit that my categories are heteroclite and not watertight. The “degré zéro” would of course be what I have already discussed, Silence. In addition to the white lie of silence, it should be noted that in many cases silence is either anodine or clearly virtuous—Oswald's silencing of praises about his heroic conduct at the fire of Ancona, for example. It should also be noted, however, that silence is often imposed by an excess of emotion, or more importantly by someone who is more powerful (Mme de Vernon on Delphine, Lady Edgermond on Corinne, or the way in which Corinne cannot improvise in front of Edgermond, the incarnation of English power).

NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION

In many cases, communication is effected by nonverbal means, particularly when an excess of emotion imposes silence. Staël was familiar with de Gérando's theory that language was not the only or even the most important system of communication—one recalls the rather comic Kalmouk prince of Ten Years of Exile who, unable to converse with the ladies who delight him, gives them diamonds instead—but the innumerable instances where gesture or glance replace language in Staël's novels should be studied, particularly because they are associated with

COMMUNICATION BY DISPLACED DISCOURSE

Direct discourse is often replaced by singing a song, often accompanied on a harp (usually in order to declare one's passion), or by citing a poem, or by evoking a work of literature, or, most importantly and frequently, by discussing a painting or a sculpture. Delphine is as much a master of this art as Corinne. Sophie and Pauline also use displaced discourse, and in her esthetic writings Staël discusses at length the communicability of music. But all these are instances where straightforward verbal communication breaks down, usually because of varying degrees of emotional intensity or incompatibility.

TO SPEAK OR TO WRITE?

The same problematics of communication appear in the numerous discussions in Staël's writing about the written versus the spoken word. Here again, her thought is complex. Serious subjects should be treated in writing, she feels, not in conversation.³⁵ Yet, the spoken word is often more sincere than the written word, and she admires the English obligation to improvise rather than read a speech. (She does not seem to have known the considerable discussions of contemporary theoreticians of eloquence about the relative merits of improvising, learning by heart, reading, or speaking from a detailed outline.) Both Léonce and Geneviève de Brabant insist on speaking rather than writing because it is more sincere, but Corinne, Mme de Lebensei, and Mlle d’Albémar know moments when they must substitute writing for speaking, out of timidity, pudeur, or intense emotion. Mme de Vernon prefers writing to speaking because it is easier to manipulate and control what one writes. And, of course, there is the problem of the extent to which the form of the epistolary novel requires that one substitute writing for speaking.

OPINION AS AN OBSTACLE TO TRANSPARENT COMMUNICATION

In the salon, opinion reigns, and, even if the salon exists for conversation, opinion imposes silence and lying. Delphine's epigram is a quotation from Mme Necker, “A man should know how to defy opinion, a woman how to submit to it,” a theory repeated in the novel not by Delphine but by Matilde.³⁶ In politics, it is necessary but also difficult to go counter to opinion; one must know how to flatter, how to please.³⁷ But generally Staël attacks the way opinion imposes dishonesty and lying, to the extent that this reader at least likes the jesuitical proposal of Mme d’Artenas that Delphine should become publicly reconciled with Mme de Vernon and at the same time be as nasty as possible about her behind her back. To do so would be to enter into the world of submission to opinion, of hypocrisy and lying. The Staël heroine refuses even if Staël's mother recommended it.

INAUTHENTIC DISCOURSE

Staël refuses this, much as she does ironic wit. She considers it “bavardage qui use l’esprit,” chit chat which destroys the mind, gossiping sprinkled with name-dropping, a waste of time where the soul is sacrificed to the taste of the day.³⁸ The exigencies of inauthentic conversation destroy sincerity of character and treat thought as a sickness that requires a strict diet of pap.³⁹ In On Germany she gives some nice examples, including the man who begins by fulsomely praising an actress he has just seen; the sardonic smiles of his audience make him temper his praise bit by bit until he ends up saying, “The poor devil did what she could” (1:103); inauthenticity leads to lies. The problem is fully represented in the novels, epitomized in Corinne by M. d’Erfeuil who, though sympathique, claims that proper form can justify any kind of content. It is more nefarious, more widespread and vitiating in Delphine, where it is associated with slander and suffering. But my favorite example is in the play The Mannequin. Sophie practices a white lie in order to avoid marriage with the egotistical and loquacious Count Erville (Erfeuil, Ervins—air vain?). Erville, who chatters and never listens, is put before a mannequin who pleases him endlessly; she is beautiful, never interrupts him, and admires everything he says. He asks her hand, freeing Sophie. Inauthentic discourse is here not the chirping of birds, but a means of reducing the other to a mute object.

IMPEDED COMMUNICATION AS A PRINCIPLE OF PLOT STRUCTURE

Often in Staël's novels, it is lies, silence, and hypocrisy which create misunderstandings but also determine the action and create suspense for the reader—all the more so because of dramatic irony: the reader knows what the characters cannot say or be told. Almost all of Delphine is constructed on this principle: the heroine's unspoken love for Léonce, the unsaid reasons why she receives M. de Serbellane, the occultation of Mme de Vernon's perfidy, the silence toward Matilde demanded by Mme de Vernon on her deathbed. It is noteworthy that it is a child, Thérèse's daughter, hence an innocent outside the social system, who reveals the truth. The purest case is probably the play Sappho; but there, as in Delphine and elsewhere, the anagnorisis, far from solving matters, produces tragedy. When the obstacle disappears and communication becomes transparent, tragedy and death result.

IMPEDED COMMUNICATION AND THE CRISIS SCENE

Significantly, the crisis scenes in Staël's writings occur when communication is impossible: Corinne, hidden spectator of Lucile and Oswald's marriage, where at the most she can communicate by sending a ring; Delphine, at Léonce's marriage to Matilde (with its tense build-up), hidden behind a pillar, veiled. One could add many others—the scene in the garden at night, the scene at the theater when Tancrède is being played, and so on. As Simone Balayé notes, a symbolic system of hidden gestures, veils, masks, and separating screens, governs the whole novel, showing that Delphine and Léonce can never get together.⁴⁰ It is this symbolic system which comes into play in the crisis scenes that articulate the plot.

THE MOTHER AS IMPEDER OF COMMUNICATION

The classic case is surely Lady Edgermond. Silence reigns in her house, and what conversation there is is completely inauthentic and concerns the weather. Corinne cannot talk to her; moreover, here again, Staël weaves a symbolic system to underline Lady Edgermond's role—her silencing the Italian musicians, the fact that she becomes mute a month before her death. Mme de Vernon is a more complex case. She will not let Delphine reveal her love to Léonce, or to Mme de Vernon herself, and she manipulates what can and especially what cannot be said, practicing both hypocrisy and censorship. “I’ll hear,” she says, “Delphine's confession of her love when I want to, but I don’t intend to for a while, so I have freedom of action.”⁴¹ She has an intense dislike for moments when one says what one thinks or tells all.⁴² She does tell all on her deathbed, but only in order to impose a new kind of silence on Delphine and Léonce. One could do a similar analysis of the mother in Sophie or Sappho or elsewhere. It is often, of course, the mother not of the heroine but of the heroine's enemy. This is a comforting kind of transference, but still the epigram of Delphine about how women must bend to opinion is from Mme Necker. Grist for the mill of psychoanalytical critics …

HYPOCRISY DONE AND UNDONE: FROM OBSTACLE TO TRAGIC TRANSPARENCE

Mme de Vernon could take as her motto Talleyrand's supposed quip, “language was given to man to hide his thoughts”; indeed, she has often been read as a caricature of the famed diplomat. Among the vices, hypocrisy in particular provokes Staël's wrath. In a noted attack in On Literature hypocrites are described as charlatans of vice, mockers of the sensitive soul, of all moral principles, who should themselves be ridiculed, handed over to the mockery of children.⁴³ Elsewhere she emphasizes how hypocrisy perverts its practitioners.⁴⁴ The exemplary hypocrite in her political writings is less Talleyrand than Napoleon, particularly in his dealings with the Poles and Czar Alexander. Once more, however, I underline that when Mme de Vernon does at her deathbed drop her mask of hypocrisy, she does so only to ask Léonce and Delphine to practice hypocrisy, thus heightening the tragedy. The same thing happens elsewhere, notably in Jane Grey, where Surrey and Northumberland are both consummate hypocrites; the latter, like Mme de Vernon, unveils all the horrors of his crime but in so doing only precipitates the tragedy. If hypocrisy is the worst of vices, is it perhaps also a necessary vice?

THAT LOVE WHICH CANNOT BE EXPRESSED

Love should create total transparency between two beings, but more than any other relationship in Staël's writings, it is vitiated by the obstacles to communication. Oswald does not dare declare his love for Corinne to Edgermond, to Erfueil, or to Corinne, creating endless misunderstandings; she cannot declare her love, nor the details of her past, not even her name, to him; Lucile finds herself in a similar impossibility. From her first meeting with Léonce, Delphine cannot talk with him, and if Léonce can declare his love for her to Barton, he cannot to Delphine. The preface evokes “those sentiments of affection which cannot be stated” and the plot is created by the obstacles to the communication of love. The play Sophie probably offers the quintessential treatment of the theme. The Count cannot declare his love for Sophie, or Sophie hers for the Count, and the Countess refuses to state anything concerning these loves. When the love is revealed, it is without saying for whom, or the revelation is created by breaking taboos. The obviously incestuous overtones of the play may explain why love cannot be declared here in so intense a fashion, but as Sophie herself observes, “When passions achieve a certain degree of violence, they are almost always veiled in silence.”⁴⁵ The main obstacles to communication are located on the Carte du Tendre.

CONCLUSION

I have probably exhausted my reader's patience, but I have not exhausted the subject. One could analyze those occasions where people refuse to speak because to do so would be to wound, to create suffering; the cases of blackmail, where saying does destroy; the refusal to state what the hero must discover on his own (see La Sunamite); the way in which transparent communication can deteriorate into the trite and the inauthentic, and then into silence. I have not discussed Staël's correspondence here, which would offer rich material for the subject. The problem in Staël should be compared to incommunicability in Constant (well studied) and in Mme de Charrière. Much of what I have been describing is a commonplace of political discourse and indeed of the tradition of the novel and the theater, but I do think that Staël's texts reveal an exceptionally high incidence of preoccupation with the failures of communication. For her, the problem is a central one. “Nature created me for conversation,” she says in her proposed panegyric.⁴⁶ She loved to converse and to communicate, and her fear of exile and hatred of despotism were deeply motivated by the fact that both provided obstacles to communication. She lived in an age that was very aware of the problematics of language and of communication, of the uses and abuses of eloquence. In many texts, she suggests an almost frenetic confidence in the potential and power of language. Language offers an inexhaustible resource and no sincere word is every wholly lost.⁴⁷ In her political writings, however, as in her fiction and plays, she shows an intense and acute awareness that there are obstacles to communication and also that transparency can be dangerous. My title is derived from Starobinski's remarkable study of Rousseau, but the world of Staël's fiction is not the utopia of the Nouvelle Héloïse, and she never chose to strive for transparency the way Rousseau did in his Confessions. Between the two occurred the Terror (where many, like Corinne, did not dare give their names) and Napoleonic despotism, under which On Germany was given more drastic treatment than that given the Encyclopédie under the ancien régime. Rousseau was a man, Staël a woman, and, as Marie-Claire Vallois says, her novels exemplify “the aphasic character of feminine discourse.”⁴⁸ She is reported to have said of her second husband, John Rocca, that “words were not his language”; perhaps Rocca is to be envied. But in Corinne, as Madelyn Gutwirth notes, and often elsewhere, silence conquers language.⁴⁹ The result, if inevitable, is nonetheless tragic.

Notes

1. Considérations sur la Révolution française, ed. Jacques Godechot (Paris: Tallandier, 1983) 427. Hereafter Considérations.

2. The problem has of course been discussed, regarding particular texts, by Staël scholars, but never in an overall analysis. Most notable are Madelyn Gutwirth, “Du silence de Corinne et de la parole,” in Benjamin Constant, Mme de Staël et le Groupe de Coppet (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation; Lausanne: Institut Benjamin Constant, 1982) 427-434; Simone Balayé, “Les gestes de la dissimulation dans Delphine,” Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 26 (1974): 189-202; and Marie-Claire Vallois, Fictions féminines: Mme de Staël et la voix de la Sibylle (Stanford: Stanford French Studies, Anma Libri, 1987).

3. Germaine de Staël, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Treuttel and Würtz, 1844) 83. Hereafter OC.

4. Simone Balayé, “Delphine, roman des lumières; pour une lecture politique,” in Le Siècle de Voltaire, Hommage à René Pomeau (ed. Christiane Mervaud and Sylvain Menant) (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1987) 37-45.

5. Considérations 427; see 482, 590; Dix années d’exil, ed. Simone Balayé (Paris: Bibliothèque 10/18, 1966) 136. Hereafter Dix années.

6. Considérations 162; Dix années 225, 228-229.

7. Considérations 72, 74; Dix années 201.

8. Considérations 76.

9. Essai sur les fictions, in OC 1: 66; De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, ed. Paul Van Tieghem (Geneva: Droz, 1959) 164. Hereafter Littérature.

10. See her criticism of Alfieri's Octavie in Corinne, ou l’Italie, ed. Simone Balayé (Paris: Gallimard, 1985) 185.

11. Littérature 349; see Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution, ed. Lucia Omacini (Geneva: Droz, 1979) 288. Hereafter Circonstances.

12. Circonstances 295.

13. Littérature 170; Circonstances 294.

14. Considérations 340-343, 410.

15. Considérations 362.

16. Considérations 368.

17. Considérations 590.

18. Littérature 31; see also 293, 416; De l’Allemagne, ed. Simone Balayé (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1968) 1:81.

19. Littérature 23.

20. Circonstances 281.

21. Littérature 306.

22. Essai sur les fictions, in OC 1:63, 65.

23. Littérature 28; Considérations 79.

24. Dix années 213; Littérature 161, 213; De l’Allemagne 1: 55-56, 174; see 1: 111 concerning interruptions of discourse in French and German.

25. Littérature 297, 300; Dix années 89.

26. De l’Allemagne 2:116; see Littérature 382.

27. De l’Allemagne 2:197. This debate among the Coppet group has been much studied. See B. Munteano, “Episodes kantiens en Suisse et en France,” Revue de littérature comparée 15 (1935): 387-459; A. Monchoux, “Mme de Staël interprète de Kant,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 66 (1966): 71-84; Ernst Behler, “Kant vu par le Groupe de Coppet,” in Le Groupe de Coppet, Deuxième colloque (Paris: Champion, 1977) 135-167.

28. De l’Allemagne 2:205.

29. Réflexions sur la paix intérieure (1798), in OC 1:58; De l’Allemagne 2:202.

30. Essai sur les fictions, in OC 1:68.

31. Histoire de Pauline, in OC 1:100.

32. Littérature 232; De l’Allemagne 2:18; Considérations 531, 556; Littérature 242.

33. Considérations 556-557.

34. Littérature 238.

35. De l’Allemagne 1:47.

36. Delphine, 5th ed. (1809) 1:11.

37. Circonstances 192; Littérature, chap. 18.

38. De l’Allemagne 1:94, 91, 101.

39. De l’Allemagne 1:103, 90.

40. Balayé, “Les gestes de la dissimulation,” 193.

41. Delphine 1:203; 2:257.

42. Delphine 2:257.

43. Littérature, 350.

44. De l’Allemagne 2:246.

45. Sophie, in OC 2:152.

46. Circonstances 120.

47. De l’Allemagne 1:142; 2:308.

48. Fictions féminines 15.

49. “Du silence de Corinne” 433.