coquette, but devoted to her (by all accounts not particularly
interesting) husband. Indeed, mother and daughter are said to have been
from a very early period jealous of each other in relation to Necker.
Germaine, as she was generally called, had, unluckily for her, inherited
nothing of her mother's delicacy of form and feature; indeed, her most
rapturous admirers never dared to claim much physical beauty for her,
except a pair of fine, though unfeminine, eyes. She was rather short
than tall; her figure was square-set and heavy; her features, though not
exactly ill-formed, matched her figure; her arms were massive, though
not ill-shaped; and she was altogether distinctly what the French call
_hommasse_. Nevertheless, her great wealth, and the high position of her
father, attracted suitors, some of whom at least may not have overlooked
the intellectual ability which she began very early to display. There
was talk of her marrying William Pitt, but either Pitt's well-known
"dislike of the fair," or some other reason, foiled the project. After
one or two other negotiations she made a match which was not destined to
good fortune, and which does not strike most observers as a very
tempting one in any respect, though it carried with it some exceptional
and rather eccentric guarantees for that position at court and in
society on which Germaine was set. The King of Sweden, Gustavus, whose
family oddity had taken, among less excusable forms, that of a platonic
devotion to Marie Antoinette, gave a sort of perpetual brevet of his
ministry at Paris to the Baron de Stael-Holstein, a nobleman of little
fortune and fair family. This served, using clerical language, as his
"title" to marriage with Germaine Necker. Such a marriage could not be
expected to, and did not, turn out very well; but it did not turn out as
ill as it might have done. Except that M. de Stael was rather
extravagant (which he probably supposed he had bought the right to be)
nothing serious is alleged against him; and though more than one thing
serious might be alleged against his wife, it is doubtful whether either