In Madame de Staël's _Delphine_ there is a scene in which the heroine enchants a large company with her graceful and expressive performance of a certain foreign dance, the shawl-dance. This scene had a foundation of reality. Her beautiful dancing was one of the many things for which the young and charming Baroness de Krüdener was remarkable. In _Delphine_ we read: "Never did grace and beauty produce a more remarkable effect upon a numerous assembly. This foreign dance has a charm of which nothing we are accustomed to see can give any idea. It is an altogether Asiatic mixture of indolence and vivacity, of melancholy and gaiety.... Sometimes when the music became softer Delphine walked a few steps with head bent and arms crossed, as if some memory or some regret had suddenly intermingled itself with the joyousness of a festival; but, soon recommencing her light and lively dance, she enveloped herself in an Indian shawl, which, showing the contours of her figure and falling back with her long hair, made of her a perfectly enchanting picture." The word _Asiatic_ is unmistakably the characterising word. In 1803 Joubert writes of Madame de Krüdener: "She is charming, with something Asiatic about her--nature exaggerated. Such extreme tenderness of feeling can hardly exist without a touch of extravagance."
Julie Barbe (Juliane Barbara) de Vietinghof was born in 1764 at Riga, in Livonia. Her education was conducted half on French, half on German lines. Her father was a distinguished, sagacious man of the world, a philosopher and Freemason, an art-lover and a Mæcenas; her mother, a sensible, conscientious woman, had been brought up on strict, old-fashioned Lutheran principles. Both parents belonged to the highest class of the old German-Russian aristocracy of the Baltic Provinces, and were connected with the Russian court.
The first teacher who made a real impression upon their young daughter, and whose instructions powerfully influenced her future, was the famous Parisian ballet-dancer, Vestris. At the age of eighteen Julie married Baron de Krüdener, a Russian diplomatist, a man fifteen years her senior, who had already been married twice, and had been divorced from both his wives. Her heart had no share in this union; the match was considered an excellent one, her vanity was gratified, and she had no manner of objection to her husband. He seems to have been a sensible, worthy, well-educated man, cultivated and calm, by no means devoid of feeling, but both by nature and from his position wedded to all the conventions of society. The Graces had not stood by his cradle.