Women of Modern France

by Hugo P. Thieme

Galiani leaves a different impression: "There is not a Friday that I do not go to your house en esprit. I arrive, I find you now busy with your headdress, now busy with this duchess. I seat myself at your feet. Thomas quietly suffers, Morellet shows his anger aloud. Grimm and Suard laugh heartily about it, and my dear Comte de Greuze does not notice it. Marmontel finds the example worthy to be imitated, and you, madame, make two of your most beautiful virtues do battle, bashfulness and politeness, and in this suffering you find me a little monster more embarrassing than odious. Dinner is announced. They leave the table and in the café all speak at the same time. M. Necker thinks everything well, bows his head and goes away."

In summer her receptions were first held at the Château de Madrid, and, later on, in a château at Saint-Ouen; the guests were always called for and returned in carriages supplied by the hostess. It was in her salon, in 1770, that the plan originated to erect the statue of Voltaire, which is to-day the famous statue of the Palais de l'Institute.

When, during the stirring times before the Revolution, her salon took on a purely political nature, Mme. Necker played a very secondary rôle. In 1788 she and her husband were compelled to leave Paris; but being recalled by Louis XVI., Necker managed affairs for thirteen months, after which he retired with Mme. Necker to Coppet, where, in 1794, the latter died.

Mme. Necker never became a thorough Frenchwoman; she always lacked the grace and charm which are the necessary qualifications of a salon leader; intelligence was her most meritorious quality. Her dinners were apt to become tiresome and to drag. A very interesting story is told of her by the Marquis de Chastellux, which was reported by Mme. Genlis, one of her intimate friends:

"Dining at Mme. Necker's, the marquis was first to arrive, and so early that the hostess was not yet in the salon. In walking up and down the room, he noticed a small book under Mme. Necker's chair. He picked it up and opened it. It was a blank book, a few of the pages of which had been written upon by Mme. Necker. Certainly, he would not have read a letter, but, believing to find only a few spiritual thoughts, he read without any scruples. It contained the plan for the dinner of that day, to which he had been invited, and had been written by Mme. Necker on the previous evening. It told what she would say to the most prominent of the invited guests. She wrote: 'I shall speak to the Chevalier de Chastellux about public felicity and Agatha; to M. d'Angeviller, I shall speak of love; between Marmontel and Guibert I shall raise some literary discussion.' After reading the note, he hurriedly replaced the book under the chair. A moment later, a valet entered, saying that madame had left her notebook in the salon. The dinner was charming for M. de Chastellux, because he had the pleasure of hearing Mme. Necker say, word for word, what she had written in her notebook."

This woman was ever preoccupied with style, and, throughout her life, retained the solemn, studied, and academic air, as well as the simple, rural, innocent manner and spirit of her early surroundings. A mere bourgeoise, unaccustomed to elegance or to the manners of French social life, upon entering Parisian society she set her mind to observing, and immediately began to change her provincial ways and to make over her esprit for conversation, for circumstances, and for characters; she adjusted her provincial spirit to that of Paris, thus making of it an entirely new product. Later on, her salon became the first of the modern political salons, but it was far from reaching the prominence of that of Mme. Geoffrin, whose characteristics were social prudence and strict propriety, while those of Mme. Necker were virtue and goodness.

Mme. Necker was never in perfect sympathy with her visitors, the philosophers, the common basis of ideas and sentiments never existing between her and her friends as it did between Mme. Geoffrin and her frequenters; her tie was always artificial. "She represented the Swiss spirit in Parisian society; those serious and educated souls, virtuous and sentimental, somewhat sad and strictly moral, were rather tiresome to the Parisian world." Marmontel well describes her in another of his famous portraits:

"A stranger to the customs of Paris, Mme. Necker had none of the charms and accomplishments of the young French woman. In her manner and language she had neither the air nor the tone of a woman reared in the school of arts, formed at the school of high society. Without taste in her headdress, without ease in her bearing, without fascination in her politeness, her mind—as was her countenance—was too properly adjusted to show grace. But a charm more worthy of her was that of propriety, of candor, of goodness. A virtuous education and solitary studies had given to her all that culture can add to an excellent nature. In her, sentiment was perfect, but her thought was often confused and vague; instead of clearing her ideas, meditation disturbed them; in exaggerating them, she believed to enlarge them; in order to extend them, she wandered off into abstractions and hyperboles. She seemed to see certain objects only through a fog, which augmented their importance in her eyes; and then her expression became so inflated that the pomposity of it would have been laughable if one had not known her to be entirely ingenuous."

"In summing up the character of Mme. Necker, we find," says Sainte-Beuve, "first of all, a genuine individuality and a personality with defects which at first impression are shocking, but which only helped to render the woman and all her aspirations the more admirable. Entering a Parisian society with the firm decision of becoming a woman of esprit and of being in relation with the beaux esprits, she was able to preserve the moral conscience of her Protestant training, to protest against the false doctrines about her, to give herself up to duties in the midst of society, to found institutions for the sick and needy,—and to leave a memory without a stain."

While, among the famous salon leaders of the eighteenth century, Mme. Necker stands out preëminently for her strict moral integrity and fidelity to her marriage relations, Mme. d'Epinay is unique for the constancy of her affections for the men to whom she owes her celebrity, Rousseau and Grimm. Born in 1725, the record of her life runs like that of most French women. At the age of twenty she was married to her cousin, La Live, who later took the name of d'Epinay, from an estate his father, the wealthy M. de Bellegarde, had bought—a man who was really in love with her for a whole month after their marriage, but who, tiring of the pure affections of a loving wife, soon began to lavish his time and fortune upon a danseuse. The poor young wife was between two fires, the extravagance and wild dissipations of her husband and the rigid discipline and orthodoxy of her mother. Never was a woman treated so outrageously and insultingly as was this woman by a man who contrived in every manner to corrupt her morals by throwing her among his dissolute companions, Mme. d'Artz, the mistress of the Prince de Conti, and Mlle. d'Ette, an intriguing woman of the time; to the latter, Mme. d'Epinay confided her troubles, and, as the result of her counsels, fell into the hands of a M. de Francueil, handsome, clever, accomplished, but as morally depraved as was her husband.