became a captain, the
regiment being embodied during the period of the Seven Years' War.

"Upon returning to Lausanne, at the age of twenty-six, in 1763, Edward
Gibbon was warmly received by his old love, but he heard that she had been
flirting with others, and notably with his friend M. Deyverdun. He
himself, while now mixing with an agreeable society of twenty unmarried
young ladies who, without any chaperons, mingled with a crowd of young men
of all nations, also 'lost many hours in dissipation.'

"He was not long in showing Suzanne that he no longer found her
indispensable to his happiness, with the result that she assailed him,
although in vain, with angry reproaches. Notwithstanding that she begged
Gibbon to be her friend if no longer her lover, while vowing herself to be
confiding and tender, he acted hard-heartedly and declined to return to
his old allegiance, coldly replying: 'I feel the dangers that continued
correspondence may have for both of us.'

"It is impossible to feel otherwise than sorry for the brilliant Suzanne
at this period, as although from her subsequent manoeuvres it became
evident that her principal object in life was to obtain a rich husband,
from the manner in which she humiliated herself to him it is evident that
she was passionately in love with the author of _The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire_.

"Eventually the neglected damsel gave up the siege of an unwilling lover,
while assuring her formerly devoted Edward that the day would come 'when
he would regret the irreparable loss of the too frank and tender heart of
Suzanne Curchod.'

"Had the pair been united, one wonders what would have been the
characteristics of the offspring of an English literary man like Gibbon,
who became perhaps the world's greatest historian, and a beautiful woman
of mixed nationality, whose subsequent career, although gilded with riches
and adorned with a position of power, displays nothing above the mediocre
and commonplace.

"Edward Gibbon's fame, which was not long in coming, was his own, and will
remain for so long as a love of history and literature exists in the
world, whereas that of Suzanne Curchod rests upon two circumstances--the
first that she was once the sweetheart of Gibbon, the second that she was
the mother of a Madame de Stael.

"When finally cast off by the Englishman, the Swiss Pastor's daughter
remembered that, if pretty, she was poor, and had her way to make in the
world. She com