She was transported with joy and triumph, and probably understood her father’s achievements better than two-thirds of the people who applauded them. For she was endowed with a marvellous quickness and completeness of comprehension, and, where she loved, her sympathy was flawless. She was always willing to welcome and adopt the thought of another, and never seemed to guess how much of force and brilliancy it owed to the illuminating power of her own vivid intellect.
On M. Necker’s retirement from the Ministry of Finance he came to St. Ouen, followed in his retreat by the pity and praise of the best and brightest minds of France. His daughter, seeing more of him than ever, now, in the greater leisure which he enjoyed, and regarding him as the heroic victim of an infamous political cabal, soon conceived for him an affection that amounted to idolatry. On his side he was enchanted with her humorous gayety, and lent himself to her playfulness in the not rare moments when Germaine’s small sum of years got the better of her large amount of intelligence.
One day Madame Necker had been called from the dining-room, during meal time, on some domestic or other business. Returning unexpectedly, she heard a good deal of noise, and, opening the door, stood transfixed with amazement on seeing her husband and daughter capering about, with their table-napkins twisted round their heads like turbans. Both culprits looked rather ashamed of themselves when detected, and their spirits fell to zero beneath the lady’s frozen glance.
The Neckers, in spite of the ex-minister’s so-called “disgrace,” continued surrounded with friends, so that from fifteen to twenty, at which latter age she married, Germaine’s days were one long intellectual triumph.
Her portraits read aloud to the guests, were eagerly received and enthusiastically applauded. She wrote one of her father, in competition with her mother; but when Monsieur Necker was appealed to on the respective merits of the two compositions, he wisely declined to pronounce any opinion. His daughter, however, divined his thoughts: “He admires Mamma’s portrait,” she said, “but mine flatters him more.”
Her own merits inspired the wits surrounding her in their turn. A portrait by Guibert described her as a priestess of Apollo, with dark eyes illumined by genius, black, floating curls, and marked features, expressive of a destiny superior to that of most women. This was an ornamental way of saying that Germaine was not beautiful. She was, in fact, very plain, strangely so, considering that she had magnificent eyes, fine shoulders and arms, and abundant hair. What spoilt her was the total want of grace. When talking, she was much too prodigal of grimace and gesture, and, if eloquent and convincing, was also overpowering.
She felt too much on every subject, and carried other people’s small stream of platitudes along in the rushing tide of her own emotions, till her hearers were left exhausted and admiring, but also a little resentful. She disconcerted the very persons whom she most revered by only pausing long enough in her talk to grasp their meaning, and feed her own thought with it till that glowed more consumingly than ever, while all the time what she felt, what they felt, and what she imagined that they meant to say was proclaimed in loud, harsh accents, most trying to sensitive nerves.
All this time she was busily writing, and her father, who nicknamed her Mademoiselle de Ste. Ecritoire, could not correct the tendency, even by his unceasing raillery. In a comedy entitled Sophie, ou les Sentiments Secrets, she scandalized Madame Necker, by selecting for a subject the struggles of a young orphan against the passion inspired in her by her guardian, a married man. To this period belong also Jane Grey and Montmorency, both tragedies, and various novelettes.
When Germaine was nearing twenty, the question of her marriage came under discussion; and serious consideration was then, for the first time, accorded to a suitor whom her large fortune had long attracted.
This was the Baron de Staël Holstein, Secretary to the Swedish Embassy. He seems to have been one of the elegant and amiable diplomatists whom the Courts of Europe in those days turned out by the score. He had wit and good manners, as he had also the golden key of the Court Chamberlain; otherwise, his personality was insignificant in the extreme.