Be it remembered that Benjamin Constant was a former lover of Madame de Stael.  The young bridegroom, following a natural instinct, had a great dislike to Benjamin, and took an opportunity of really small provocation to challenge him to a duel, which, owing to wiser counsels, was never fought.  There does not seem to have been very much to fight a duel about.  Constant had a quarrel with his father in which he involved Madame de Stael, and Rocca resented it like a gallant youthful husband, who was at that stage when it is thought desirable to shoot or otherwise kill somebody, in order to show the extent of his devotion to his enchantress.  Rocca had hoped to die (so he said) before her, but fate willed that he should linger on and suffer for six months more.  Madame de Stael slept peacefully into her last long sleep on July 14, 1817.

Her career was chequered and restless.  She had influence, which she used oft-times recklessly, and led less gifted people than herself into committing needless errors.  She wrote and spoke with a wit and sarcasm which charmed all but those at whom it was directed.  Her bitter rebuffs and severe trials were mainly of her own making.  For the most part she wrote with superficial feeling and without real soul.  During the Napoleonic regime, time was a creeping horror to her, but she found pleasure in the thought that it was a torture to her suffering heart.  George Eliot knew and used her extraordinary power; Madame de Stael wasted hers.  Nevertheless she had many friends who loved her society.  Wellington was brought under her influence.  Byron, who shrank from her at first, says, “She was the best creature in the world.”  She had been at some pains to try to bring Lord and Lady Byron together.  She was capable of impressing people with her charm, but magnetic influence she had none when living, and has left none behind.

Rocca exclaimed, when he heard that she had passed to the shadows, “What crown could replace that which I have lost!” And the distracted Benjamin Constant, filled with remorse, reproached himself for some undefined suffering he had caused her, and did penance all night through in the death-chamber of his divine Juliet.

This crazy woman seems to have been capricious in everything.  She made and broke liaisons with amazing rapidity while undergoing a compulsory sojourn at Coppet.  She formed there an attachment for the son of a person named M. Baranti, which very nearly cheated Rocca from becoming her husband, and the faithless Benjamin Constant from being, erroneously perhaps, associated with her name as the author of the manuscript of St. Helen, and she the notoriety of writing “Ten Years of Exile,” which was published after her death.