The Salon of Madame Necker

Suzanne Curchod (1737-94) was living at Lausanne when she agreed to marry the young Edward Gibbon, but the engagement was broken off. Employed as companion to the then fiancée of Jacques Necker (1732-1804), later the finance minister of Louis XVI, she married him in 1764. Their only daughter, Anne Louise Germaine, is better known as Madame de Staël. Madame Necker was eager for her husband, a wealthy banker, to pursue a political career, but Jacques Necker's efforts towards financial reform made him unpopular at court, and his dismissal in July 1789 was one of the triggers for the French Revolution. His subsequent failure to control events led to his retirement to Switzerland in 1790. Volume 1 of this biography, written by a descendant, the comte d'Haussonville, and published in English in 1882, describes Suzanne's early life, her marriage, and the establishment of her brilliant Paris salon.