BOOKS.
MADAME NECKER.* l'sw of us can visit a great historical house, or even one of those smaller ancestral homes which are scattered not only over Eng- land but in the cities of Italy and the valleys of Switzerland, through the plains and along the rivers of France and. Germany, without trying to re-people in imagination the old halls and rooms with the men and women whose portraits still hang on the walls, and to call them to live again their old lives before our eyes and in our hearing. We long to find a talking oak among the trees which have been standing there, age after age, while successive generations of men and women have come and gone, like its own leaves ; and, if not a talking oak, yet M. d'Ilaussonville has found in the old tower of Coppet more than one speaking witness of Monsieur and Madame Necker, and of their daughter, Madame de Steel, in the journals of Madame Necker, and the letters—theirs, or her own, and her husband's— which passed between the two latter and such men and women as Gibbon, Buffon, Grimm, Marmontel, D'Alembert, Diderot, Madame clu. Deffand, Madame Geoffrin, Madame d'Houdetot, the Duchesse de Lauzun, and many others, now better known to French than to mere English readers. The Chateau of Coppet, a few 'miles from Geneva, was bought, with its than existing feudal rights, by M. Necker, after his first resignation of his Controller-Generalship. There he finally retired, with his wife, and there they and their daughter, Madame de Staol, were buried ; and in an ancient tower of the chateau— so ancient that it may have been built in 1257 by Peter of Savoy, though the greater part of the chateau dates from the seventeenth century—have been preserved the papers of which M. d'Haussonville gives an account in the volumes before us. He does not mention the story, told to-day at Coppet, of the enterprising foreigner—not an Englishman—who, on hearing of the .existence of these papers, intimated, by jingling the napoleons in his pocket, that he was prepared. to treat for taking them over at a price."
Susanne Curchod (afterwards Madame Necker) was born in 1737, at the little village of °sassier, in the Pays de Vaud, where it touches France. Her father was the Protestant minister of the parish, and her mother a French refugee from the persecu- tions of Louis XV. Madame Necker, with that desire which most of us feel—and which is not necessarily born either of pride or vanity—to connect ourselves with the past, endeavoured to establish proofs of the ancient and. noble descent of both her parents, though the genealogist and the antiquarian hesitated to admit the claims. But, at least, she received and preserved through life that best inheritance,—the training and the example of a virtuous, pious, simple, and self-denying father and mother; and alike in the trials and griefs of poverty and orphanage, and in the temptations of wealth and social enjoyment, she realised the proud device—the " canting " motto, as the heralds call it— of the Symonds family, "In mundo immtunclo sim mundus." And M. d'Haussonville, writing in Catholic France, points out— what to Englishmen is a fact so common as hardly to attract our attention to its real iMportance—that in Protestant Switzer- land there were, and still are, few families of the better classes in which some member is not a minister of the Gospel ; and that while this mingling of the clergy with the world perhaps some- what lowers the ecclesiastical level, it raises that of the family, 4' Lc Salon de Madame Necker, dais des Documents ti,-t! s des Archives de Coppet. Par is Vicomte d'Haussonville, Ammo ASpiitd. 2 vols. Paris : 'Dalmatia Levy. and gives a tone of propriety to the social life of those classes which is not always found in other countries, and to which the daughters of this married clergy, with their stricter training, so largely contribute.
M. Curchod devoted himself to the education of his only child. At sixteen, Susanne could write " Cieeronian Latin," and knew something of geometry, music, and painting. The society of the neighbouring city of Lausanne was refined and educated, while simple and virtuous, under the leadership of the noble families of Vaud, who preferred the town to the country, but who had laid aside their pride and exclusiveness to share the life of the citizens. Here La belle Curchod, excelling all the girls in beauty and all the youths in knowledge," was welcomed heartily, and soon became the ornament of the place. The young ladies of Lausanne had already a little society—like those one hears of in America—to which they only admitted young gentlemen ; and now a more important "Academy of the Springs," or "of the Powder-mill," from the valley in which it usually held its meetings, was formed of these youths and maidens, with its "knights and ladies," and its statutes, of which Susanne was the president under the name of Themira, surrounded by Celandons, Sylvauders, and such like shepherds of Arcady. It was a revival of the old Provençal Courts of Love, chastened by the purity of the home life of Switzerland ; and the rules for flirtations, without "too heroic a constancy," are as innocent as they are absurd. The account of the essays, the odes, and the elegies, in French or Latin, and the self-drawn portraits of the aspirants to this order of Academic knighthood, remind us of the charming follies of Love's Labour's Lost. M. d'Haussonville tells us that the numerous originals of these still exist, and chief among them are those addressed to the first president herself, many of them ending in serious declarations and offers of marriage. Madlle. Curehod had already been the object of admiration of the young ministers (young curates, as we might say), who were only too glad to come to assist her father in his Sunday duties ; but the only man on whom she looked with favour— in her own maiden words, "the only man she ever loved,"—was the young Englishman, Edward Gibbon, just her own age, and now at Lausanne. But to this story we may, perhaps, refer again hereafter.
The death of M. Curchod. in 1760 left his widow and daughter with such small means that the latter was obliged to give lessons at Lausanne ; and the loss of her mother three years later made life still more difficult, as well as more sad. But now, as always, she became the object of true and devoted friends. The Duchesse d'Enville took her with her to Paris. There she became, in 1764, the wife of the rich Genevese banker, M. Necker, with whom she shared the next thirty years of such prosperity as a life of mutual esteem and love, religion and virtue, and social and political importance could give them, in spite of her sufferings from bad. health and the calamities which the Revolution at last brought upon them. The former president of the Academy of tho Powder-mill of Lausanne had now a wider field open to her peculiar talents for leadership in society, —that half-fashionable; half-literary society which is found in all the capitals of Europe, but which has always boasted pre- eminence in Paris. At this time, the patronage of rich financiers and the protection of statesmen were alike important to the men of letters who made the life of the Salons, but who had often reason to dread both poverty and the Murillo. The wealth of M. Necker and his relations with the French Government, in which he afterwards became the Minister of the Finances, sup- plied Madame Necker with the material forces which her genius was so fitted to employ. "The Fridays of Madame Necker," where Voltaire said they reasoned of the virtue and philosophy which they themselves illustrated, became fa,mous among she men of letters ; while her Tuesdays were reserved for her more intimate friends. They were received sometimes at M. Necker's Hotel Leblanc in Paris, sometimes at his Chateau de Saint Ouen, on the banks of the Seine, and those literary men who had. no carriages of their own were brought out to the chateau by those of Madame Necker. Of the men and women who frequented these salons, M. d'Haussonville gives a succes- sion of portraits, some of which are far from flattering. We see the mean and spiteful Marmontel and Moreilet, eating the dinners and suppers of Madame Necker, and soliciting patronage and pensions from the Controller-General with gross adulation, and then abusing their patrons in their respective Memoirs. Grimm and Diderot, dissolute in their lives, and able to find in Catherine IL of Russia the realisation of their philosophical ideal of a sovereign, showed a genuine respect for their virtuous and religious hostess and correspondent, Madame Necker. Diderot, indeed, whose conscience was not entirely silenced by his hard, scientific intellect, or his shameless habits of a naked savage, showed himself greatly sensible of Madame Necker's good influence in more than one self- condemning letter. Another of the Encyclopusdists who was found, though less often, at Madame Necker's receptions was D'Alembert. Then we have the Nea- politan Abb6 Galiani, a man of no moral worth, but the most graceful of the butterflies of society; and Saint Pierre, the author of Paul and Virglnia, the first reading of which in Madame Necker's salon is said to have caused such profound ennui. Then follow the ladies—some good, some bad, but all sparkling in the beauty, the wit, the manners, or the rank which shone in the salons of Paris in those days, and which we connect with such names as those of Madame Geoffiin and Madame du Defraud. Few people, and least of all persons of the social tastes and intense love of society which characterised Madame Necker, fail to be fascinated by these drawiug-room meetings of intellect and fashion, though they often seem to mere outside observers to be worthy only of scorn. "We have," said the cynic Chamfort, three categories of friends,—those who are indifferent to us, those who are disagreeable, and those whom we detest ;" and in reading M. d'Ha.ussonville's descriptions of many of Madame Necker's Paris friends, we are disposed to think she might have put more than one of them in the second, or even the third category. It seemed strange and sad, indeed, to those old friends in Switzerland in whom the strict religious spirit of Calvin still survived, when they heard of these gatherings of atheists in Madame Necker's drawing- rooms ; but she assured them that she was mistress there, and never allowed any irreligious discussion, and that her own faith was unshaken. It was true that she had friends who were atheists :—" Pourquoi non Ce sont des amis malheureux.' Other and better friends, too, she had, There was the pastor Moulton. (who had made this remonstrance), the husband of the friend of her girlhood, in whose family she had given lessons in the days of her poverty, who had tried to recover for her the affections of Gibbon, and who for thirty years showed her a brother's love. There was Thomas, who was laughed at by Voltaire and the wits of the day for his simplicity and his morality, but whom M. d'Haussonville shows us to have been worthy of the affection with which Madame Necker responded to his respectful devotion to her. Nor must we omit Bouffon from the list of her better friends, and of those whose falter. ing faith she seems to have helped. Her intimacy with such women as the Mar6chale du Luxembourg, Madame du Deffand, and Madame de Marchais was not less censured than that with the "Atheists ;" but her real friends were undoubtedly good women—such as the Duchesse de Lauzun, the noblest and purest of those who died on the scaffold of the Revolution. These associations of the good and bad are, even in out days, too much a matter of rank and of fashion, and far more were they so in that time and in Paris ; but, as we may repeat with M. d'Haussonville, Madame Necker's life and reputation always remained unspotted in that most corrupt society.
Those who really care for politics usually find them, as years go on, more interesting than letters. And probably it was 110 unpleaeing change to Madame Necker when, during the seven years between her husband's first and second periods of office, her salon became the centre of the great Liberal party, who still hoped to effect reform without revolution, and where the master of the house, no doubt, took a more livelk interest in the conversations than in the days when he only replied with an absent " ?" Then came the short return to office, the final retirement—in time to escape the scaffold of the Terror— to Coppet, where the last days of Madame Necker, suffering from bad health and the sad fate of her friends, were still cheered by the unfailing devotion of her husband to her, and hers to him. But for the rest of her story, and for glimpses of her daughter Madame de Stalil in her childhood, when she refused t°.thiuk of William Pitt as a suitor, and when she became the wife of the Swedish Ambassador, we must refer our readers to these pleasant volumes.
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