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Updated: June 3, 2025
She had been married at nineteen she was now twenty-six: in those seven years of suffering there had been ample time to obliterate all traces of the frivolous, worldly girl whom Bonstetten had seen light-heartedly laughing at her old husband's jokes; there had been plenty of time to produce in this excessively intellectual nature that vague dissatisfaction, that desire for the ideal, which is the price too often paid for the consolation of mere abstract and literary interests.
Listening was not destined to be her rôle in later years; but to pace up and down the long drawing room at Coppet, with the invariable green branch in her beautiful hands, uttering words that charmed such guests as Schlegel, Sismondi, Bonstetten of Geneva and Chateaubriand.
There visited there, at one time or another, Madame Récamier and Madame Krüdner; Benjamin Constant, who was so long Madame de Staël's lover; Bonstetten, the Voltairean philosopher; Frederika Brun, the Danish artist; Sismondi, the historian; Werner, the German poet; Karl Ritter, the German geographer; Baron de Voght; Monti, the Italian poet: Madame Vigée Le Brun; Cuvier; and Oelenschlaeger.
What would she have felt, that strong, calm lady, growing old far off in the Isle of Skye, had she been able to see what Bonstetten saw; had she heard the Count and Countess of Albany laughing, the one with the laughter of an old sot, the other with the laughter of a giddy child, over the adventures of that heroic Prince Charlie whose memory was safe in her heart as the sheets he had slept in were safe in her closet, waiting to be her grave-clothes?
"Yesterday evening the illusion of Coppet was complete. I had been with Madame de Staël to call on Madame Rilliet, who is so charming at her own fireside. On my return I played chess with Sismondi. Madame de Staël, Mlle. Randall, and Mlle. Jenner sat on the sofa chatting with Bonstetten and young Barante. We were as we had always been as we were in the days that I shall never cease regretting."
This sensible young lady was the Comtesse de Custine." Her home at Coppet became the home of many great people. Sismondi, the author of the History of the Italian Republics, and Literature of Southern Europe, encouraged by her, wrote here several of his famous works. Bonstetten made his home here for years.
Forty-four years later, when the Queen of Hearts was a stout, dowdy old lady, with no traces of beauty, and himself a flighty, amiable old gossip of seventy, Karl Victor von Bonstetten wrote to the Countess of Albany from Rome: "I never pass through the Apostles' square without looking up at that balcony, at that house where I saw you for the first time."
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