STAEL Germaine de (1766-1817). L.A., March 10 [1803], s.l., addressed to Claude HOCHET. 7 pages in-8 autographed in black ink on 2 double sheets (lower right corner of the second sheet torn without missing, trace of stamp, folds). Letter from Madame de Staël to her friend Claude Jean-Baptiste Hochet, written during her exile in Switzerland under the Consulate. As usual, Madame de Staël marks very little the punctuation. We have partially restored it for the comfort of the reading. "I thank you from the bottom of my heart my dear friend, for your long letter. I don't know, in this Delphine of which you speak, two pages more witty than your visit to Pietet's and about hospitality. I would be very tempted to make use of them. What a singular character indeed! that this continual need to pretend to the opposite excess, to a defect, and what an illusion to flatter oneself to deceive men about one's own nature. One conceals the facts, the opinions, but the qualities and the defects betray themselves by all that imposes our being. I come to me. My letter to him is politics and unfortunately I am condemned to it by my situation. He had unwittingly shown me all the servility of his character and he had left furious that I had seen it. As the opinion of this country is much more moral than that of France, he cannot do the Talley. with me. So he wrote two 8-page letters containing thirty in and out parentheses of explanation and my cousin urged me to write to him to bind him to be good or at least not bad. I have done so and I stand by it. France is necessary for my happiness. Without this sad dependence I would be another and yet think if it is possible to do less for her happiness. Do you have any doubt that such a letter from me or such a printed eulogy would finish everything? About the printed eulogy, do you think me absurd enough to write this preface before my business is finished? Maradan is currently making the 4th edition without my having added a single word. He wants to do two more for the beginning of the winter and it is for these that I ask for your comments. It was not the criticisms but the tone of these criticisms that had crumpled me a little. Besides, I am, if it is possible, even more attached to you than I was then and nothing in the world, now, can alter my affection for you. The greatest test, however, that you could put it through, would be to show my letters. If you want them to be even more intimate, I must have a security in this respect that I lack. Would it not be possible to insert in the Publicist itself these facts: the number of editions in Paris? Two translations in London and three in Germany. It seems to me that these facts, if put without reflection, are without danger. I am not talking about you but about them. No my friend, if I become happy again you will not experience what Mme de D. made you experience. There is in the French sense something that takes away from the affections their duration, from the qualities themselves their reality. Ah, how Old England touches me more. Do you notice Lord Attenborough's speech in condemning Colonel Deyard, and Captain Macnamara's vindication, and all that true, sensitive, dignified, restrained nature which, amidst the dust of French phrases, makes the effect of a man's steps in the desert. You say that at our age one cannot form new affections. No longer in French but in English. They show me here an affection which touches me and without which I would not have endured so well these days of exile and this narrowed gossip of Geneva which goes so badly with my character or my spirit. But the friends of childhood, but the country, but the language. Ah! one must live in France. But if this England were reversed [...]