[Mémoires sur l’Impératrice Joséphine]

First published Edinburgh Evening Post, probably in the missing issue of 1 or 8 November 1828. Reprinted Kelso Mail ‘(From the Edinburgh Evening Post)’ 13 November 1828 [pp. 1–2]). Never subsequently reprinted. This author identifies himself as a regular critic, and one of his paper’s co-editors, through phrases like ‘For want of room we must confine ourselves’, ‘We are sorry we have room for no more’, and ‘if the following … volumes … seem equal to this first one, we shall return to the work with pleasure’. The word ‘between’, where the other co-editor, Crichton, would use ‘betwixt’, leaves De Quincey as the only plausible candidate for authorship. Even more telling is the recollection of ‘accounts we have heard’ of Madame De Staël’s conversation, ‘not at second-hand, but immediately, from her intimate friends’. Those words identify the author not merely as a ‘reader’ of Germaine De Staël, but also as one who had ‘heard’ ‘accounts’ of De Staël, directly and ‘immediately’, from her‘intimate friends’. Germaine De Staël was never in Scotland, and was only in England for two brief periods (in 1793 and 1813–14); and she died in 1817. Although De Quincey never spoke with Madame De Staël, he both saw her, and received accounts of her conversation, from his mother’s friends around 1813, when she lived near De Quincey’s family in the Bath area. (For another allusion to De Quincey’s literary acquaintances ‘near Bath’, in 1813, see Vol. 5, pp. 234, 235). Like this critic for the Post, De Quincey was less interested in De Staël’s novels and other writings, than in her powers of conversation, which he discusses (in much the same tone as this reviewer) in his essays on ‘Conversation’ (Vol. 16) and ‘Sketches of Life and Manners’ (Vol. 9). De Quincey was also (again like this reviewer) an avid reader of memoirs connected with the French Revolution; he would have been the obvious choice to review Georgette Ducrest’s book for the Post.