Through purest serendipity, there will be a conference on Germaine de Stael here in St. Louis in May. About five years ago I started working on an alternate history set in 1923 French America. The conceit is that Napoleon never sold Louisiana to the United States, but managed to keep it. There are several reasons for this, a few of them historically legitimate, but it is a science fiction novel after all. In the course of researching the whole Napoleonic era, I stumbled on this woman, de Stael, and came to regard her as a phenom. She was one of the few people toward whom Napoleon seems to have shown actual fear and the only woman, as far as I can tell, and I became intrigued. …
