^{Note 1 in page 109} David Glass Larg, La Vie dans G œuvre (Paris: Champion, 1924), p. 67.

^{Note 2 in page 109} References to Mme de Staël's works, unless otherwise specified, are to the Œuvres Complètes (1820), ed. in 12°

^{Note 3 in page 109} A certain Frédéric de Chateauvieux reports on her conversational deference to her father: “Mme de Staël avait dans ces luttes littéraires et philosophiques une grande supériorité sur son père, en promptitude, en facilité, en éloquence. Mais prête à atteindre le but, une pudeur filiale la saisissait, et comme effrayée du succès qu'elle allait obtenir, elle se fourvoyait avec une grâce inimitable, pour laisser à son concurrent la gloire de la vaincre.” Quoted by F. Kohler, Madame de Staël et la Suisse (Paris : Payot, 1916), p. 298.

^{Note 4 in page 109} J.-J. Rousseau, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1969), iv, 736–37.

^{Note 5 in page 109} Georges Poulet, “La Pensée critique de Mme de Staël,” Preuves, No. 190 (déc. 1966), p. 28.

^{Note 6 in page 109} “Mme de Staël,” Europe (La Femme et la littérature), Nos. 427, 428 (nov.-déc. 1964), p. 66.

^{Note 7 in page 109} Mme de Staël was frequently caught up in such confusions of passion and comprehension concerning great men. One is reminded of her ambiguities of feeling concerning Napoleon, documented with such glee by Guille-min.

^{Note 8 in page 109} Italics mine.

^{Note 9 in page 109} In her opening remarks on Emile she makes an obscure statement, in an aside, that conflicts with Rousseau's ideas on the education of women. “Enfin, si les femmes, s‘élevant au-dessus de leur sort, osoient prétendre à l‘éducation des hommes; si elles savoient dire ce qu'elles doivent faire, si elles avoient le sentiment de leurs actions, quelle noble destinée leur seroit réservée!” (i, 46). This is but a wistful hope for parity for women, the consequences of which are exclaimed over rather than thought out. But even this much optimism is repressed in her longest passage concerning Rousseau on women.

^{Note 10 in page 109} Her mother, Suzanne Curchod, had written, “sur la terre je ne vivais que pour ton père, car tu étais pour moi une portion de lui-même. … Tu seras femme et mère . . . apprends à ton mari et à tes enfants que ton père doit être pour eux sur la terre le centre de tout.” Quoted by Gabriel-Paul Othenin d'Haussonville, Le Salon de Madame Necker (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1882), n, 57.

^{Note 11 in page 109} Ibid, p. 49.

^{Note 12 in page 109} De l'Allemagne (Paris: Hachette, 1958), iv, 369. This edition is basically the emended 1814 manuscript. The 1810 edition was destroyed by the government censors, and the work reappeared in London in 1813. Mme de Staël made many changes and additions to the 1810 text, and Mme de Pange and Mlle Balayé have noted the alterations from manuscripts A and B, both in Mme de Staël's hand, and C, apparently in the hand of her secretary Fanny Randall, and corrected by Mme de Staël.

^{Note 13 in page 109} “… in some ways On Germany seems an apostasy from the liberal, rationalist position of On Literature to which Mme de Staël returned in the Considerations.” J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to an Age (New York:

Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), p. 389. 14 De l'Allemagne, iv, 379.

^{Note 15 in page 109} Obviously I must disagree with Paul de Man when he says, “il serait possible à Mme Staël d'affirmer: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, c'est moi, sans s'aliéner le moins du monde de sa nature. Car c'est cette possibilité de se substituer ainsi à Rousseau qui définit son être propre.” “Mme de Staël et Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” Preuves, No. 190 (déc. 1966), p. 37. There are times when she might have said this and believed it, and this is part of the problem posed in this essay. I think there is a distinction to be made here between her will to identify with Rousseau and her capacity to do so. If Rousseau's moi passionnel and her own seem to her interchangeable at a given moment, it is because she has fully assumed this role: she wants to give herself. But the pose never lasts. The very act of “writing out” her dolorous passions restored her energies for a return to that arena of action she always needed, and in which a buoyant resiliency and faith always sustained her, despite her recurrent and deep melancholia. VEnthousiasme provides a pole opposite to douleur for her, of equal force.

I think de Man poses Mme de Staël's problem of self and its relation to Rousseau very well, but his analysis of its genesis seems to me faulty, in that he does not choose to examine its feminine dimension. There is a large dose of “minority thinking” in Mme de Staël's stance, of “Uncle Tomism,” of sexual complicity, an attempted identification with the masculine (Rousseau's) view of the world that she hopes will make her, as victim, pitiable, acceptable, desirable. But this position of victim, masochistically satisfying in some ways, is really painful to her. She experiences this self-abnegation as tragic (see Mirza, Zulma, Corinne) and cannot really reconcile herself to it.

So her self h far from exhausted by its Rousseauist side. Indeed, for me, it is in the tension of opposition to this side of her that I find her being most herself, a tension generated by the problem of creating what would be in her own eyes an identity both feminine and her own.

^{Note 16 in page 109} Rousseau has a specific attack upon Ninon de Lenclos a few pages earlier in the fifth book of Emile. “Dans le mépris des vertus de son sexe, elle avoit, dit-on, conservé celles du nÔtre: on vante sa franchise, sa droiture, la sûreté de son commerce, sa fidélité dans l'amitié. Enfin, pour achever le tableau de sa gloire on dit qu'elle s'étoit faite homme: à la bonne heure. Mais avec toute sa haute réputation, je n'aurois pas plus voulu de cet homme-là pour mon ami que pour ma maîtresse” (p. 736).

^{Note 17 in page 109} Ibid., p. 768.

^{Note 18 in page 109} Larg comments, “Cela veut dire qu'au seuil de la mort, Mme de Staël ne concevait pas sa vie, ne pouvait la concevoir, autrement qu'elle n'avait été. Pour être heureuse, il lui fallait la gloire.” La Vie dans l'œuvre, p. 68. I agree with the first part of this statement, but it is the very absence of any grandiose note here that must be accounted for. I think it a sign that the gloire Mme de Staël had long sought and finally achieved had lost weight in her scales, and had become for her de-dramatized, unimportant, as compared with the basic right to the sheer exercise of her talents.