“Very handsome and sprightly in appearance, the fair Suzanne was well instructed in sciences and languages. Her wit, beauty and erudition made her a prodigy and an object of universal admiration upon the occasion of her visits to her relations in Lausanne. Soon an intimate connection existed between Edward Gibbon and herself; he frequently accompanied her to stay at her mountain home at Grassy, while at Lausanne also they indulged in their dream of felicity. Edward loved the brilliant Suzanne with a union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, and was in later years proud of the fact that he was once capable of feeling such an exalted sentiment. There is no doubt that, had he been able to consult his own inclinations alone, Gibbon would have married Mademoiselle Curchod, but, the time coming when he was forced to return to his home in England his father declared that he would not hear of ‘such a strange alliance.’
“‘Thereupon,’ says Gibbon in his autobiography, ‘I yielded to my fate—sighed as a lover, obeyed as a son, and my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence and new habits of life.’
“These habits of life included four or five years’ service in the Hampshire Militia, in which corps Suzanne’s lover became a captain, the regiment being embodied during the period of the Seven Years’ War.
“Upon returning to Lausanne, at the age of twenty-six, in 1763, Edward Gibbon was warmly received by his old love, but he heard that she had been flirting with others, and notably with his friend M. Deyverdun. He himself, while now mixing with an agreeable society of twenty unmarried young ladies who, without any chaperons, mingled with a crowd of young men of all nations, also ‘lost many hours in dissipation.’
“He was not long in showing Suzanne that he no longer found her indispensable to his happiness, with the result that she assailed him, although in vain, with angry reproaches. Notwithstanding that she begged Gibbon to be her friend if no longer her lover, while vowing herself to be confiding and tender, he acted hard-heartedly and declined to return to his old allegiance, coldly replying: ‘I feel the dangers that continued correspondence may have for both of us.’
“It is impossible to feel otherwise than sorry for the brilliant Suzanne at this period, as although from her subsequent manœuvres it became evident that her principal object in life was to obtain a rich husband, from the manner in which she humiliated herself to him it is evident that she was passionately in love with the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
“Eventually the neglected damsel gave up the siege of an unwilling lover, while assuring her formerly devoted Edward that the day would come ‘when he would regret the irreparable loss of the too frank and tender heart of Suzanne Curchod.’
“Had the pair been united, one wonders what would have been the characteristics of the offspring of an English literary man like Gibbon, who became perhaps the world’s greatest historian, and a beautiful woman of mixed nationality, whose subsequent career, although gilded with riches and adorned with a position of power, displays nothing above the mediocre and commonplace.
“Edward Gibbon’s fame, which was not long in coming, was his own, and will remain for so long as a love of history and literature exists in the world, whereas that of Suzanne Curchod rests upon two circumstances—the first that she was once the sweetheart of Gibbon, the second that she was the mother of a Madame de Staël.
“When finally cast off by the Englishman, the Swiss Pastor’s daughter remembered that, if pretty, she was poor, and had her way to make in the world. She commenced to play fast and loose with a M. Correvon, a rich lawyer, whom she said she would marry ‘if she had only to live with him for four months in each year.’