say, word for word, what she had written in her
notebook."

This woman was ever preoccupied with style, and, throughout her life,
retained the solemn, studied, and academic air, as well as the simple,
rural, innocent manner and spirit of her early surroundings. A mere
bourgeoise, unaccustomed to elegance or to the manners of French
social life, upon entering Parisian society she set her mind to
observing, and immediately began to change her provincial ways and to
make over her _esprit_ for conversation, for circumstances, and for
characters; she adjusted her provincial spirit to that of Paris, thus
making of it an entirely new product. Later on, her salon became the
first of the modern political salons, but it was far from reaching the
prominence of that of Mme. Geoffrin, whose characteristics were social
prudence and strict propriety, while those of Mme. Necker were virtue
and goodness.

Mme. Necker was never in perfect sympathy with her visitors, the
philosophers, the common basis of ideas and sentiments never existing
between her and her friends as it did between Mme. Geoffrin and her
frequenters; her tie was always artificial. "She represented the Swiss
spirit in Parisian society; those serious and educated souls, virtuous
and sentimental, somewhat sad and strictly moral, were rather tiresome
to the Parisian world." Marmontel well describes her in another of his
famous portraits:

"A stranger to the customs of Paris, Mme. Necker had none of the
charms and accomplishments of the young French woman. In her manner
and language she had neither the air nor the tone of a woman reared
in the school of arts, formed at the school of high society.
Without taste in her headdress, without ease in her bearing, without
fascination in her politeness, her mind--as was her countenance--was
too properly adjusted to show grace. But a charm more worthy of her
was that of propriety, of candor, of goodness. A virtuous education
and solitary studies had given to her all that culture can add to an
excellent nature. In her, sentiment was perfect, but her thought was
often confused and vague; instead of clearing her ideas, meditation
disturbed them; in exaggerating them, she believed to enlarge them;
in order to extend them, she wandered off into abstractions and
hyperboles. She seemed to see certain objects only through a fog,
which augmented their importance in her eyes; and then her expression
became so inflated that the pomposity of