There is a world elsewhere.
—Coriolanus Act III, scene iii

Exile is a terrible fate, a source of bitterness and grief since the time of the ancient Hebrews as they sat down by the waters of Babylon and wept. In our own tormented era, a great many people have felt what it means to be forcibly cut off, perhaps forever, from their treasured familiar culture. On this theme, Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Mme. de Staël (1766–1817), the great forerunner of the modern literary and political dissidents, still has much of value to communicate. For a woman as highly strung and imaginative as she was, exile figured as grimly as death itself—and she was by no means the first to think in that way. She often remembered that, nearly a hundred years earlier, the statesman and writer Viscount Bolingbroke had associated exile and death. Her thoughts also turned to the Roman poet Ovid sent into exile by the Emperor Augustus and left to bemoan his fate among the Scythians on the shores of the Black Sea, where he died.

Whatever her virtues —and she was certainly courageous–prudence was not among them. For a long time, she did not comprehend that in Napoleon she was dealing with a new phenomenon.

Tradition has it that Ovid was exiled for a poem that gave offense as well as for involvement in a sexual-cum-political scandal. Mme. de Staël’s fault in the eyes of the leaders of the Committee