ke her memory eternally respected."

CHAPTER IX

SALON LEADERS--(CONTINUED)

MME. NECKER, MME. D'EPINAY, MME. DE GENLIS: MINOR SALONS

It seems strange indeed that in a century in which the universal
impulse was toward pleasure, and sameness of personality was
visible everywhere, the types of great women showed such an absolute
dissimilarity. The contrast between the natural inclinations of Mme.
Necker, the wife of the great minister of finance, and the atmosphere
in which she lived, makes the study of her a most interesting one.
Born in Switzerland, the daughter of Curchod, a poor Protestant
minister, "with patriarchal morals, solid education, and strong
good sense," this moral and stern woman was thrown into the midst of
depraved elegance, refined licentiousness, and physical debauchery.
Sincere, chaste, enthusiastic, and essentially religious, she remained
so amidst all the corruption and physical and mental degeneracy of the
age.

Critics have made much ado over her marriage, a union of pure love and
mutual inclinations, amidst the marriages of mere convenience and the
gallant liaisons, such as those of Mme. du Deffand and _le President_
Henault, and Mme. d'Epinay and Grimm. The matrimonial selection of
Susanne Curchod was natural in a girl of her serious make-up, her
moral education and her pure ancestry of the strict Protestant type.
As a girl of sixteen, she had given evidence of remarkable mental
ability and had acquired a wide knowledge--physics, Latin, philosophy,
metaphysics--when she was sent to Lausanne, possibly with the idea
of meeting a future husband with whom she could become thoroughly
acquainted before giving up her independence. There she became
the centre of a group or academy of young people, who, under her
leadership, discussed subjects of every nature. At first she showed
a tendency toward _preciosite_ and the spirit of the blue-stocking
rather than toward the seriousness and dignity which marked her later
career.

It was at Lausanne that she met and fell in love with Gibbon, the
English historian; this love affair met with opposition from Gibbon's
father, and, after the death of the father of his fiancee, a calamity
which left her poor and necessitated her teaching for a living,
the Englishman, by his actions and manner toward her, compelled the
breaking of their engagement. When, later in life, he went to her
salon, they became intimate friends, enjoying "the intellectual union