Maupertuis, the astronomer, wrote:  “What a marvel, moreover, to have been able to combine the fine qualities of her sex with the sublime knowledge which we believe uniquely made for us!  This enterprising phenomenon will make 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 which had been impossible for them in their earlier days.”