who, for private reasons of their own, might be willing to join hands with him.
At this critical juncture of affairs another illustrious woman exercised a decisive influence on the march of events. Madame de Staël, then but twenty-five, had become the rallying-point of the Constitutionalists, as was Madame Roland of the Gironde. Placed in hostile political camps, they never met, and Madame Roland makes but one allusion, and that a curious one, to the future "Corinne." In a letter from Lyons, dating back as far as November 1789, she says: "Report spreads all kinds of stories about Madame de Staal (sic), who is said to be regularly present at the Assembly, and to send little billets from the gallery to her devoted cavaliers, in order to encourage their support of patriotic measures. The Spanish ambassador, it is said, has gravely reproached her for it at her father's table. You cannot imagine what importance the Aristocrats attach to these absurdities, hatched, no doubt, in their own brains; but they would fain depict the Assembly as led by a few feather-brained youths, egged on by a dozen of women or so." Madame de Staël, either from feminine jealousy, or possibly acquainted with Madame Roland's stinging attacks on M. Necker, her father (of whom she had said, among other things, that he was for ever speaking of his character, without rhyme or reason, as women of gallantry do of their virtue), in her description of the Girondin group, never even alludes to the woman who was its inspiration.
Narbonne, made Minister of War by the influence of Madame de Staël, fell in with the popular war-cry, in the hope of re-establishing the King's authority on a firm Constitutional basis. The Court party
