Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein ( 22 April 1766 – 14 July 1817), commonly known as Madame de Staël, was a French-speaking Swiss author living in Paris and abroad. She influenced literary tastes in Europe at the turn of the 19th century. She was the best friend and mentor of Madame Récamier
She then moved to Coppet, and there gathered round her a considerable number of friends and fellow-refugees, the beginning of the salon which at intervals during the next twenty-five years made the place so famous. In 1793, however, she made a visit of some length to England, and establi emigrants: Talleyrand, Narbonne, Montmorency, Jaucourt and others. There was not a little scandal about her relations with Narbonne; and this Mickleham sojourn (the details of which are known from, among other sources, the letters of Fanny Burney) has never been altogether satisfactorily accounted for.
It was during these years that Mme de Staël was of chief political importance. Narbonne’s place had been supplanted by Benjamin Constant, whom she first met at Coppet in 1794, and who had a very great influence over her, as in return she had over him. Both personal and political reasons threw her into opposition to Bonaparte.
The operations of the imperial police in regard to Mme de Staël are rather obscure. She was at first left undisturbed, but by degrees the chateau itself became taboo, and her visitors found themselves punished heavily. Mathieu de Montmorency and Mme Récamier were exiled for the crime of seeing her; and she at last began to think of doing what she ought to have done years before and withdrawing herself entirely from Napoleon’s sphere.

“At that date, 1798, Mme. de Stael was thirty-two years old and Juliette was twenty-one. This difference of eleven years between the two friends explains how, from the very beginning of their intimacy, Germaine Necker was to play the affectionate and protecting part of an elder sister to the younger woman, whom we might almost call a girl. Mme. de Stael already possessed the authority conferred by a great and powerful talent united to a thorough experience of life. From this time forward her example was to guide and lead Mme. Recamier ; the two lives were to be so closely woven together that for the space of twenty years there is no possi- bility of separating them.” Memoirs of Madame de Récamier by Mme Lenormand

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