CHAPTER II.
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 humour, 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 ardour 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 neighbourhood, 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 for ever 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 favour 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-humoured 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 ardour the most fervent, of all Madame Necker's friends, was Buffon. He wrote her some eighty letters full of fervid flattery 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 for ever.
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 favourable 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 d'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.