ly
in love with her.

He says: "I found her learned without pedantry, lively in
conversation, pure in sentiment, and elegant in manners; and the first
sudden emotion was fortified by the habits and knowledge of a more
familiar acquaintance.... At Crassier and Lausanne I indulged my dream
of felicity; but on my return to England I soon discovered that my
father would not hear of this strange alliance, and that, without
his consent, I was myself destitute and helpless. After a painful
struggle, I yielded to my fate; I sighed as a lover; I obeyed as a
son." Gibbon never married, but retained his life-long friendship and
admiration for Madame Necker.

It was not strange, therefore, that Gibbon liked to be present in
her _salon_, where Buffon, Hume, Diderot, and D'Alembert were wont
to gather. The child of such parents could scarcely be other than
intellectual, surrounded by such gifted minds. Her mother, too, was a
most systematic teacher, and each day the girl was obliged to sit by
her side, erect, on a wooden stool, and learn difficult lessons.

"She stood in great awe of her mother," wrote Simond, the traveller,
"but was exceedingly familiar with and extravagantly fond of her
father. Madame Necker had no sooner left the room one day, after
dinner, than the young girl, till then timidly decorous, suddenly
seized her napkin, and threw it across the table at the head of her
father, and then flying round to him, hung upon his neck, suffocating
all his reproofs by her kisses." Whenever her mother returned to the
room, she at once became silent and restrained.

The child early began to show literary talent, writing dramas, and
making paper kings and queens to act her tragedies. This the mother
thought to be wrong, and it was discontinued. But when she was twelve,
the mother having somewhat relented, she wrote a play, which she and
her companions acted in the drawing-room. Grimm was so pleased with
her attempts, that he sent extracts to his correspondents throughout
Europe. At fifteen she wrote an essay on the _Revocation of the Edict
of Nantes_, and another upon Montesquieu's _Spirit of Laws_.

Overtaxing the brain with her continuous study, she became ill,
and the physician, greatly to her delight, prescribed fresh air and
sunshine. Here often she roamed from morning till night on their
estate at St. Ouen. Madame Necker felt deeply the thwarting of her
educational plans, and years after, when her daughter had acquired