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Rh her salon to any reprobate, provided only he were witty.

Madame Necker, first known to us as Suzanne Curchod, was the daughter of a Swiss pastor, and saw the light in the presbytery of Crassier in the Pays de Vaud. The simple white house, with its green shutters, is still to be seen, separated from the road by a little garden planted with fruit-trees. The Curchods were an ancient and respectable family whom Madame Necker (it was one of her weaknesses) would fain have proved entitled to patents of nobility. Some Curchods or Curchodis are found mentioned in old chronicles as fighting beneath the banners of Savoy, and it was from these that Madame Necker sought vainly to trace her descent. She held a secret consultation, for this cherished object, with the Sieur Chérin, genealogist to the King; but his decision disappointed her. Chagrined, but not convinced—for her opinions were not easily shaken—she carried home the precious papers and locked them up without erasing the endorsement, Titres de noblesse de la famille Curchod, which she had written with her own hand.

M. Curchod took pains to give his only daughter an unusually thorough and liberal education. She knew Latin and a little Greek, "swept with extreme flounce the circle of the sciences," and was accomplished enough in every way to attract the admiration, very often even the love, of sundry grave and learned personages.

Mixed with her severe charm there must have been some coquetry, for at a very early age she began making conquests among the young ministers who arrived on Sundays at Crassier, ostensibly to assist M. Curchod in his duties; and a voluminous