tivated
Gibbon when he was a young man at Lausanne. Every reader of his
autobiography will remember the famous passage in which he describes
his engagement, the opposition of his father, and the resignation with
which he 'sighed as a lover, but obeyed as a son.' M. d'Haussonville
has published from the archives at Coppet some melancholy letters
which show clearly that Gibbon exhibited more heartlessness and
inflicted more suffering than might be gathered from his own stately
narrative. But no lasting scar remained. After a few years of poverty
and hardship, during which she was obliged to earn a livelihood as a
schoolmistress, Mademoiselle Curchod found in Necker a husband who
realised her fondest wishes; and when, soon after, she became the
centre of a brilliant salon at Paris, her former lover, then in the
zenith of his fame, was often among her guests. Madame Necker did not
always abstain from slightly veiled allusions to the past, but it is
pleasant to see that a warm and solid friendship seems to have grown
up between Gibbon and both his host and hostess. A pretty anecdote is
related of how, on one occasion, after he had left the house, they
agreed in expressing the deep regret with which they looked forward to
his approaching departure for England; when their little daughter, who
was then just ten years old, gravely offered to prevent the
catastrophe by marrying the illustrious, but by no means
prepossessing, historian.

It was a saying of Talleyrand that he who had not lived before 1789
had never known the full charm of life. Germaine Necker grew up in the
last bright flush of a society which had, perhaps, as many
fascinations as any that the world has known. Her mother, however,
though she occupied a prominent position in this brilliant world, was
never altogether of it. She shared fully, indeed, its intellectual
tastes, and had herself won some small place in literature. She threw
herself ardently into its philanthropic movements, and especially into
that for the reform of the hospitals. She formed a warm and true
friendship with Buffon and Thomas. She corresponded with Voltaire, and
attracted to her house most of the best writers of the age. But to the
last she remained eminently and characteristically Swiss, and she
never acquired the light touch, or the easy, pliant grace, of the true
Parisian. She was a little cold, a little prim, a little pedantic, a
little self-conscious. Neither her reserved manners nor