An interesting contrast to the French-Russian Madame de Krüdener is to be found in the German-Russian Princess Galizin, a lady who belongs to the end of the eighteenth, as Madame de Krüdener does to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Madame de Krüdener's characteristics stand out more sharply on such a background as the life of Madame de Galizin. The Princess's is a genuinely German type of character. She is as simple as her younger contemporary is polished and complex; she is ingenuous and at the same time sentimental, full of soul and wanting in brain-power. Her husband was, like Krüdener, a man of the world. He was a friend and admirer of Diderot; it was, indeed, Diderot who first inspired the Princess with the desire and the courage to study, but she soon became that philosopher's ardent opponent. As careless of her feminine attractions as Madame de Krüdener was coquettish, Madame de Galizin had her head shaved to make it impossible for her to go into society, and from the age of twenty-four lived a life of seclusion. To cure herself entirely of egoism she "offered to the God of love the sacrifice of her understanding." As an instance of her ignorance of the world it may be mentioned that, when her son desired to enter the military service of a foreign country, she applied first to the Prussian, then to the Austrian commander-in-chief for permission to send along with him a tutor who was to guard him against the irregular habits of military life, and was astonished by receiving the answer from both that it was impossible for an officer to join the army accompanied by a male governess of this description.
In spite of Princess Galizin's warm-hearted sincerity, her tone is as pietistically supernatural as Madame de Krüdener's is mystically sensual.[4]
In Madame de Krüdener we have before us a being whose original equipment would seem to mark her as destined to act some important part. She possesses a vigour of life and a vividness of emotion sufficient for two ordinary human beings; only it is not healthy vigour and emotion, but an inward restlessness, an inward fire, which gives out sparks incessantly on every side. There is in her an original capital of Russian volatility and pliability, German sentimentality, French sense of proportion, and "Asiatic" sensual charm.