The “dear friend” was M. Necker, and the “little daughter” of the house must then have been about four or five years old, for it was in the very year of her birth (1766) that Madame Geoffrin took her celebrated journey to Poland, and it was some little time after her return that she became intimate with Germaine Necker’s parents.
They were still in the Rue de Cléry. M. Necker’s elevation to the Contrôle Général was in the future and had probably not been foreseen; it is possible that even the Éloge de Colbert, which betrayed his desire for power, had not yet appeared; nevertheless, he was already a great man. His controversy with the Abbé Morellet, on the subject of the East India Company, had brought him very much into notice; and, although his arguments in favor of that monopoly had not saved it from extinction, they had caused his name to be in everybody’s mouth.
His position as Minister for the Republic of Geneva gave him the entry to the Court of Versailles, and brought him into contact with illustrious personages, who otherwise might have disdained a mere wealthy foreigner, neither a noble nor a Catholic. His well-filled purse completed his popularity, for it was not seldom at the service of abject place-hunters and needy literati. Moreover, he had been fortunate in his choice of a wife.
By the time that the King of Poland’s bonne maman wrote that little note to Madame Necker, the wife of the Genevese banker had founded a salon as brilliant and crowded as Madame Geoffrin’s own. She had achieved this in a few years, whereas Madame Geoffrin for the same task, and in spite of her wealth and generosity, had required a quarter of a century.
But Madame Necker, besides being young, rich and handsome, was bitten with the prevailing craze for literature, could listen unweariedly for hours to the most labored portraits and éloges, and, although herself the purest and most austere of women, would open her salon to any reprobate, provided only he were witty.
Madame Necker, first known to us as Suzanne Curchod, was the daughter of a Swiss pastor, and saw the light in the Presbytery of Crassier in the Pays de Vaud. The simple white house, with its green shutters, is still to be seen, separated from the road by a little garden planted with fruit trees. The Curchods were an ancient and respectable family whom Madame Necker (it was one of her weaknesses) would fain have proved entitled to patents of nobility. Some Curchods or Curchodis are found mentioned in old chronicles as fighting beneath the banners of Savoy, and it was from these that Madame Necker sought vainly to trace her descent. She held a secret consultation for this cherished object with the Sieur Chérin, genealogist to the King; but his decision disappointed her. Chagrined, but not convinced—for her opinions were not easily shaken—she carried home the precious papers and locked them up without erasing the endorsement, Titres de noblesse de la famille Curchod, which she had written with her own hand.
M. Curchod took pains to give his only daughter an unusually thorough and liberal education. She knew Latin and a little Greek, “swept with extreme flounce the circle of the sciences,” and was accomplished enough in every way to attract the admiration, very often even the love, of sundry grave and learned personages.
Mixed with her severe charm there must have been some coquetry, for at a very early age she began making conquests among the young ministers who arrived on Sundays at Crassier, ostensibly to assist M. Curchod in his duties; and a voluminous correspondence, somewhat high-flown, as was the fashion of the day, is extant, to prove that Suzanne possessed the art of keeping her numerous admirers simultaneously well in hand. Verses, occasionally slightly Voltairian in tone, were also addressed to her; and later in life Madame Necker reproached herself for her placid acceptance of the homage thus expressed, and owned that had she understood it better she would have liked it less.
Suzanne’s parents, proud, no doubt, of their daughter’s talents and accomplishments, took her after a while to Lausanne. That pleasant city, since giving up its own political ideals and falling under the sway of Berne, had lapsed into easy-going, intellectual ways, and even professed a discreet and modified form of Voltairianism. Ever since the author of the “Henriade” had dazzled it with his presence, it had been on the look-out for illustrious personalities, and welcomed all foreigners who showed any promise of literary distinction.
What with her pretensions to be a bel-esprit, her youth and beauty, Mademoiselle Curchod captivated the town at once, and very soon had the proud joy of founding an Académie de la Poudrière, and being elected to preside over it under the fantastic name of Thémire. The members of this intellectual society were of both sexes and all young. Their duties consisted in writing portraits of one another, and essays or odes on subjects in general. Combined with these profound pursuits there seems to have been a good deal of flirtation, and, doubtless, both the scholasticism and the sentiment were equally to Suzanne Curchod’s taste.