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 it would have been laughable if one had not known her to be entirely ingenuous.”

“In summing up the character of Mme. Necker, we find,” says Sainte-Beuve, “first of all, a genuine individuality and a personality with defects which at first impression are shocking, but which only helped to render the woman and all her aspirations the more admirable.  Entering a Parisian society with the firm decision of becoming a woman of esprit and of being in relation with the beaux esprits, she was able to preserve the moral conscience of her Protestant training, to protest against the false doctrines about her, to give herself up to duties in the midst of society, to found institutions for the sick and needy,—­and to leave a memory without a stain.”

While, among the famous salon leaders of the eighteenth century, Mme. Necker stands out preeminently for her strict moral integrity and fidelity to her marriage relations, Mme. d’Epinay is unique for the constancy of her affections for the men to whom she owes her celebrity, Rousseau and Grimm.  Born in 1725, the record of her life runs like that of most French women.  At the age of twenty she was married to her cousin, La Live, who later took the name of d’Epinay, from an estate his father, the wealthy M. de Bellegarde, had bought—­a man who was really in love with her for a whole month