There was much about Mile.  Necker’s parentage that made her interesting.  Her father was the Genevese banker and minister of Louis XVI, who failed wretchedly in his attempts to save the finances of France.  Her mother, Suzanne Curchod, as a young girl, had won the love of the famous English historian, Edward Gibbon.  She had first refused him, and then almost frantically tried to get him back; but by this time Gibbon was more comfortable in single life and less infatuated with Mlle. Curchod, who presently married Jacques Necker.

M. Necker’s money made his daughter a very celebrated “catch.”  Her mother brought her to Paris when the French capital was brilliant beyond description, and yet was tottering to its fall.  The rumblings of the Revolution could be heard by almost every ear; and yet society and the court, refusing to listen, plunged into the wildest revelry under the leadership of the giddy Marie Antoinette.

It was here that the young girl was initiated into the most elegant forms of luxury, and met the cleverest men of that time—­ Voltaire, Rousseau, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Volney.  She set herself to be the most accomplished woman of her day, not merely in belles lettres, but in the natural and political sciences.  Thus, when her father was drawing up his monograph on the French finances, Germaine labored hard over a supplementary report, studying documents, records, and the most complicated statistics, so that she might obtain a mastery of the subject.

“I mean to know everything that anybody knows,” she said, with an arrogance which was rather admired in so young a woman.

But, unfortunately, her mind was not great enough to fulfil her aspiration.  The most she ever achieved was a fair knowledge of many things—­a knowledge which seemed surprising to the average man, but which was superficial enough to the accomplished specialist.

In her twentieth year (1786) it was thought best that she should marry.  Her revels, as well as her hard studies, had told upon her health, and her mother believed that she could not be at once a blue-stocking and a woman of the world.

There was something very odd about the relation that existed between the young girl and this mother of hers.  In the Swiss province where they had both been born, the mother had been considered rather bold and forward.  Her penchant for Gibbon was only one of a number of adventures that have been told about her.  She was by no means coy with the gallants of Geneva.  Yet, after her marriage, and when she came to Paris, she seemed to be transformed into a sort of Swiss Puritan.

As such, she undertook her daughter’s bringing up, and was extremely careful about everything that Germaine did and about the company she kept.  On the other hand, the daughter, who in the city of Calvin had been rather dull and quiet in her ways, launched out into a gaiety such as she had never known in Switzerland.  Mother and daughter, in fact, changed parts.  The country beauty of Geneva became the prude of Paris, while the quiet, unemotional young Genevese became the light of all the Parisian salons, whether social or intellectual.