We came here yesterday, and here we are in the very apartments occupied
by M. Necker, opening into what is now the library, but what was once
that theatre on which Madame de Stael used to act her own _Corinne_.
Yesterday evening, when Madame de Broglie had placed me next the oldest
friend of the family, M. de Bonstettin, he whispered to me, "You are now
in the exact spot, in the very chair where Madame de Stael used to sit!"
Her friends were excessively attached to her. This old man talked of her
with tears in his eyes, and with all the sudden change of countenance
and twitchings of the muscles which mark strong, uncontrollable feeling.

There is something inexpressibly melancholy, awful, in this house, in
these rooms, where the thought continually recurs, Here Genius _was!_
here _was_ Ambition, Love! all the great struggles of the passions; here
was Madame de Stael! The respect paid to her memory by her son and
daughter, and by M. de Broglie, is touching. The little Rocca, seven
years old, is an odd, cold, prudent, old-man sort of a child, as unlike
as possible to the son you would have expected from such parents. M.
Rocca, brother to the boy's father, is here: handsome, but I know no
more. M. Sismondi and his wife dined here, and three Saladins, father,
mother, and daughter. M. de Stael has promised to show to me Gibbon's
love-letters to his grandmother, ending regularly with "Je suis,
mademoiselle, avec les sentimens qui font le desespoir de ma vie," etc.

M. de Bonstettin--Gray the poet's friend--told me that in Sweden, about
thirty years ago, he saw potatoes in the corner of a gentleman's garden
as a curiosity. "They tell me, sir," said the gentleman, "that in some
countries they eat the roots of this plant!" Now they are cultivated
there, and the people have become fond of them.