Etienne de Jouy (from the French Academy)
We read what follows in the volume XVI of the complete works by Mr. de Jouy, entitled: Mixtures, page 99; it is a dialogue between Mrs. de Staël, deceased, and the living Duc de Broglie.
Mr. de Broglie: What do I see! Can it be?
Mrs. de Staël: My dear Victor, do not be alarmed, and without questioning me about a miracle whose cause no living being can penetrate, enjoy with me for a moment the happiness that this nocturnal apparition gives us both. There are, as you see, bonds that even death cannot break; the sweet harmony of feelings, views, opinions, forms the chain that connects perishable life to immortal life, preventing what has been united for long from being separated forever.
M. de Broglie: I believe I could explain this happy sympathy by intellectual concordance.
Mrs. de Staël: Don't explain anything, please, I have no more time to waste. These relations of love that survive the material organs do not leave me oblivious to the feelings towards the objects of my most tender affections. My children live; they honor and cherish my memory, I know that; but there is where my present connection with Earth ends; the night of the tomb envelops everything else.
In the same volume, page 83 and following, there is another dialogue, where various historical figures are staged, revealing their existence and the role they have played in successive lives. The correspondent who sent us this note adds:
"I believe, like you do, that the best way to bring a good number of recalcitrant to the doctrine that we preach, is to show them that what they see as an ogre ready to devour them, or as a ridiculous buffoonery, is nothing else but only what was hatched by meditation on the destinies of man, in the brains of serious thinkers of all times."
Mr. de Jouy was a writer in the beginning of this century. His complete works were published in 1823, in twenty-seven volumes, by Didot edition.
