Her husband hardly counted for more in her life than her _maitre d'hotel_, and though there seems to have been no particular harm in him, had no special talents and no special virtues.

Her first regular lover, Narbonne, was a handsome, dignified, heartless _roue_ of the old _regime_.

Her second, Benjamin Constant, was a man of genius, and capable of passionate if inconstant attachment, but also what his own generation in England called a thorough "raff"-- selfish, treacherous, fickle, incapable of considering either the happiness or the reputation of women, theatrical in his ways and language, venal, insolent, ungrateful.

Schlegel, though he too had some touch of genius in him, was half pedant, half coxcomb, and full of intellectual and moral faultiness.

The rest of her mighty herd of male friends and hangers-on ranged from Mathieu de Montmorency--of whom, in the words of Medora Trevilian it may be said, that he was "only an excellent person"-- through respectable savants like Sismondi and Dumont, down to a very low level of toady and tuft-hunter.