During this stay at Coppet she made the acquaintance (1810) of a young Italian of good family named Rocca, who had fought in the French army in Spain, and had gone to Geneva to recover from his wounds. The young officer of hussars, aged twenty-five, worshipped Madame de Staël; and she, a mature matron of forty-six, married him, but the marriage was kept secret, in order, it is said, that she should not be obliged to change her celebrated name.
Napoleon having banished Schlegel, the eminent German poet and critic (who had accompanied her in her travels and been tutor to her son), and subjected herself to a petty _surveillance_, she rushed restlessly over Europe to Vienna, Moscow, St. Petersburgh, thence through Finland to Stockholm. In 1813, she arrived in England, and was the lion, or lioness, of at least one London season, the whig aristocracy fêting her, and Sir James Mackintosh trumpeting her praises in the _Edinburgh Review_. She was celebrated for the persecutions she had endured, and as the only person of note who had stood firm against Napoleon to the last.
At the Restoration, she returned to her beloved Paris. From Louis XVIII. she met with the most gracious reception; and restitution was made to her of two million livres long due to her father from the royal treasury. But her old foe was only caged. He broke the bars of his prison, cleared the inconstant court in a few hours, was hailed by the army and the people, and spared none who had taken part in the restoration. “I felt,” she says, “when I heard of his coming, as if the ground yawned beneath my feet.” In the spring of 1816, she was at Coppet, the centre of a brilliant circle, with Lord Byron near her at the Villa Diodati. To Madame de Staël, Paris was the centre of the world, and accordingly in the autumn of this year we find her there again, the lady-leader of the Constitutionalists. In her saloon might have been seen Wellington and Blucher, Humboldt and Châteaubriand, Sismondi and Constant, the two Schlegels, Canova the sculptor, and Madame Recamier, whom the defeat of Napoleon had once more restored to liberty.
But she did not long enjoy the society of the metropolis which she loved so well. In February, 1817, she was seized with a violent fever. On her deathbed she said to Châteaubriand, “I have loved God, my father, and liberty.” The royal family were constant inquirers after her health, and the Duke of Wellington called daily at her door to ask if hope might yet remain. At two o’clock on Monday, the 14th July, she died in perfect peace, at the age of fifty-one. The day of her death was the anniversary of the Revolution which had exerted so great an influence on her life.