GERMAINE.
When Germaine was about six years old, M. Necker retired from the bank,
and devoted himself to the study of administrative questions. This was
in preparation for the career to which he felt himself called. For
years past his wealth had come frequently to the aid of a spendthrift
Government and an exhausted exchequer; and it was natural that he should
seek his reward in power. In his _Éloge de Colbert_, published in 1773,
he was at no pains to conceal that he was thinking of himself when
drawing the portrait of an ideal Minister of Finance; and some annoyance
at Turgot’s appointment is thought to have added force to his attacks on
the latter’s theories concerning free trade in corn.
Madame Necker, profiting by her husband’s growing importance, quickly
attained the summit of her ambition in becoming the presiding genius of a
salon thronged with intellectual celebrities. Buffon and Thomas were her
most trusted friends, but, austere though she was, she did not disdain
to admit to a certain intimacy men like Marmontel, the Abbé Galiani, St.
Lambert, and Diderot. They all flattered her outrageously to her face,
while some of them, Marmontel especially, sneered at her behind her
back. All made love to her, and, misled by the studied warmth of pompous
eloquence with which she proclaimed her delight in their society, they
not rarely persuaded themselves that they had added her to the list of
their conquests, and were chagrined and not a little disgusted later to
discover that the only man she cared for was her husband. Indeed, she
bored everybody with praise of M. Necker, composing and reading aloud in
her own salon a preposterous _portrait_ of him, in which she compared
him to most things in heaven and earth and the waters under the earth,
from an angel to a polypus. Her rigidity, her self-consciousness, her
want of charm, and absence of humor, were a fruitful theme of ridicule
to the witty and heartless parasites who crowded her drawing-rooms and
made raids on her husband’s purse. And yet such was the native force of
goodness in her that, sooner or later, in every instance, detraction
turned to praise. The bitter Madame de Genlis, who detested the Neckers,
and ridiculed them unsparingly, admits that the wife was a model of
virtue; and Diderot paid her the greatest compliment which she, perhaps,
ever received, when declaring that had he known her sooner, much that he
had written would never have seen the light.
Grimm was another frequenter of the Necker salons; and the mistress of
the house being no less prodigal of gracious encouragement towards him
than towards everybody else, he also eventually declared his sentiments
of friendship and admiration, with as much warmth as his manners allowed
of. Like Voltaire, he called her “Hypatie”; and testified the genuineness
of his regard by scolding her about her religious opinions. Needless
to say these were not infidel, but they were, in Grimm’s opinion,
disastrously illogical; and, his fine taste in such matters being
offended, he expressed his displeasure on one occasion in no measured
terms. Madame Necker retorted, for she loved a discussion too fervently
ever to be meek; but apparently Grimm was too much for her. Either his
arguments were irrefragable, or his manner was irritating; the result
was that Madame Necker—to the polite consternation of her numerous
guests—dissolved into tears.
Humiliated, on reflection, at having made such a scene, with
characteristic ardor, she seized the opportunity to write Grimm a
high-flown apology; and an interchange of letters followed in which the
philosopher compared the lady to Venus completed by Minerva, and Madame
Necker ransacked the universe for metaphors wherewith to express her
admiration of the gentleman’s sensibility.
As the Neckers spent their summer at St. Ouen—not the historic Château
associated with Louis XVIII., but another in the neighborhood, and of the
same name—the proximity to Paris enabled them to continue unbroken their
series of dinners, suppers and receptions, twice a week.
Many of the guests were notable personages, and most of them types
which vanished forever a few years later—engulphed by the storm-wave
of the Revolution. There was the Abbé Morellet, clear-headed, gravely
ironical, with as much tact in concealing as in displaying the range of
his knowledge and the depth of his insight; St. Lambert, a little cold,
but full of exquisite politeness, supremely elegant in expression, and,
without being lively himself, possessed of the delicate art of never
quenching liveliness in others; D’Alembert, charming, if frigid, and
destined soon to be an object of sentimental interest, because of his
inconsolable grief for Mlle. L’Espinasse; the Abbé Raynal, doubtless
enchanted to pour into Madame Necker’s respectful ears the floods of
eloquence for which Frederick the Great laughed at him; these, with
Marmontel and Thomas, were almost always present.
A few years earlier the Abbé Galiani, delightful and incorrigible, would
also have been seen. This extraordinary little man, political economist,
archæologist, mineralogist, diplomatist and pulcinello, was one of Madame
Necker’s professed adorers. Everybody liked and admired him; Diderot
described him as “a treasure on a rainy day”; Marmontel as “the prettiest
little harlequin,” with “the head of Macchiavelli”; while, for Madame
Geoffrin, he was her _petite chose_. After so much praise, and from such
people, Madame Necker must certainly have accepted him unconditionally;
but it would be interesting to know exactly with what air she listened
to his impassioned declarations. When eventually restored to his native
land—or, as he expressed it, exiled from Paris—he wrote her impudent and
characteristic epistles, in which reproaches at her virtue, intimate
interrogations regarding her health, and envy of M. Necker’s happiness,
mingled with inquiries after everybody in the beloved capital, and wails
of inconsolable grief at his own departure. “_Quel désert que cinquante
mille Napolitains!_” he exclaims.
Madame Du Deffand was also for a time an intimate guest at the Neckers’.
The friendship did not last long. The marquise, by this time infinitely
weary of men and things, appears soon to have tired of Madame Necker’s
declamations and M. Necker’s superiority. Her final judgment on the wife
was very severe, rather ill-tempered, and therefore unjust. Madame Necker
was, she says, “stiff and frigid, full of self-consciousness, but an
upright woman.” Her liking for the husband held out longer, but finally
succumbed to the discovery that, while very intelligent, he failed to
elicit wit from others. “One felt oneself more stupid in his company than
when with other people or alone.”
There is no trace of any variation in the friendship between Madame
Necker and Madame Geoffrin. Perhaps the latter, with her habitual gentle
“_Voilà, qui est bien_,” called her young friend to order, and early
repressed the emphatic praises which could not but have wearied her.
We are told that she hated exaggeration in everything; and how could
Madame Necker’s heavy flattery have found favor in her eyes? Her delicate
_savoir-vivre_, too, that preternaturally subtle sense which supplied the
place in her of brilliancy and learning and early education, must have
been vexed at Madame Necker’s innocent but everlasting pedantry. We can
fancy, however, that she managed, in her imperceptible, noiseless way,
to elude all these disturbing manifestations; and then she was doubtless
pleased at Madame Necker’s good-humored patience with her scoldings. All
Madame Geoffrin’s friends, as we know, had to submit to be scolded;
but probably few showed under the infliction the magnanimity of Madame
Necker, who must have possessed all the power of submission peculiar to
self-questioning souls. The calm old lady, ensconced in her own peculiar
chair, whether in Paris or at St. Ouen, in the midst of the sparkling
society to which she had perseveringly fought her way, was disturbed in
her serenity by no presage of misfortune.
In point of reputation the most illustrious, and in point of romantic
ardor the most fervent, of all Madame Necker’s friends, was Buffon. He
wrote her some eighty letters full of fervid flatter and genuine, almost
passionate affection, to which she responded in the terms of adulation
that the old man still held dear. Such incense had once been offered
to him in nauseating abundance; now that he was old and lonely it had
diminished, and this fact, joined to his unquestionable admiration for
Madame Necker, made him all the more easily intoxicated by her praise.
Mixed with her high esteem for his genius was a womanly compassion for
his bodily sufferings that rendered the tie uniting their two minds
a very sweet and charming one. On hearing that his end was near, she
hastened to Montbard, where he was residing, and established herself by
his bedside, remaining there five days, and courageously soothing the
paroxysms of pain that it tortured her own sensitive nature to see.
Perhaps her strong and unconcealed desire that the philosopher should
make a Christian end, lent her fortitude to continue the self-imposed
task. There is no proof that she directly influenced him in that final
declaration of faith by which he scandalised a free-thinking community;
but she had often discussed religious questions with him, and deplored
his want of a definite creed; consequently, it is possible that her mere
presence may have had some effect upon him at the last.
On the brink of the irrevocable, even the pride of controversy may come
to be a little thing; and Buffon’s wearied spirit perhaps recoiled from
further speculation on the eternal problem of futurity. And to be at one,
in that supreme moment, with the pitying woman who had come to solace his
final agony, may have weighed with him above the praise and blame over
which the grave was to triumph forever.
Madame Necker delighted in making herself miserable, and the melancholia
natural to him probably caused Thomas to be the most thoroughly congenial
to her of all her friends. The author of the _Petréide_ and the foe
of the Encyclopædists, he enjoyed during his life a celebrity which
posterity has not confirmed. He was the originator of the unhappy style
of writing in which Madame Necker so delighted that she modelled her
own upon it. For the rest, he was a man of extremely austere and simple
life, as well as of very honest character. Passion was unknown to him,
unless, indeed, the profound and sentimental esteem which he felt for
Madame Necker was of a nature under more favorable treatment to have
developed into love. If so, she found the way in his case, as in all, to
restrain his feelings within platonic bounds, and indulged him chiefly
with affecting promises not to forget him when she should be translated
to heaven.
Madame Necker may be said to have touched the zenith of social
distinction the day on which the Maréchale de Luxembourg entered her
salon. This charming old lady and exquisite _grande dame_, the arbiter
of politeness and fine manners, was felicitously and untranslatably
described by Madame du Deffand, in one delightful phrase, as “_Chatte
Rose!_” Upon all those who met her at this period (when she was already
nearly seventy), she seems to have produced the same impression of
softness and elegance, of fine malice and caressing, irresistible ways.
Madame de Souza—that sweet little woman round whose name the perfume
of her own roses still seems to cling—drew a portrait of the Maréchale
in her novel _Eugénie de Rothelin_, under the name of the Maréchale
de’Estouteville; nor did she, as Ste. Beuve tells us, forget to
introduce, by way of contrast, in the person of Madame de Rieny, the
pretty and winning Duchess de Lauzun, grand-niece of the Maréchale, and
another flower of Madame Necker’s salon.
This little Duchess, “_joli petit oiseau à l’air effarouché_” (to quote
Madame du Deffand once again), was so devoted an admirer of M. Necker,
that, hearing somebody in the Tuileries Gardens blame him, she slapped
the speaker’s face. Apart from this one outburst, which saves her from
seeming too meek, she flits shadowy, sweet and pathetic, across the
pages of her contemporaries. The record of her life, as we know it, is
brief and touching. She kept herself unspotted from a most depraved
world; loved a very unworthy husband and died, during the Terror, on the
scaffold.
Another friend, and apparently a very sincere one, of Madame Necker, was
Madame d’Houdetôt. Madame Necker seems to have accepted that interesting
woman just as she was, including her relations with St. Lambert, whom the
letters exchanged between the two ladies mention quite naturally. The
affection which she felt for the mother was extended by Madame D’Houdetôt
to the little daughter, and there are letters of hers extant describing
visits which she had paid to Germaine, while Madame Necker was at Spa or
Mont Doré for her health.
They were written to relieve the natural pain of absence on the parents’
part, and are full of praises of the child, of her engaging ways, her air
of health, and her magnificent eyes.