lost no opportunity of persuading the Swedish King's trio of witty correspondents, who in their turn were careful to impress on Gustavus, as well as on Louis XVI. and his Queen, that the next Swedish ambassador must be endowed with a splendid fortune.

A grand marriage was, of course, to be the means of achieving this; and Mademoiselle Germaine Necker, an heiress and a Protestant, was fixed upon for the bride.

The delicate negotiations lasted for some considerable time, during which period the prize the Baron sought was disputed by two formidable rivals― William Pitt and Prince George Augustus of Mecklenburg, brother of the reigning Duke. Madame Necker warmly supported Pitt's suit, and showed great displeasure at being unable to overcome her daughter'sobstinate aversion to it. Seeing how distinguished the Englishman already was, and how brilliant his future career promised to be, one wonders a little at Ger-maine's rejection of him. Probably the secret of her determination lay in the passionate adoration which she had now begun to feel for her father, on whom— as all his friends and partizans assured her—the eyes of misery-stricken France were fixed as on a saviour.

The idea of quitting France in such a crisis, at the dawn, so to speak, of her father's apotheosis, would naturally be intensely repugnant to her; and possibly for that very reason Madame Necker, always a little jealous of the sympathy between her husband and her daughter, warmly advocated Pitt's claims. A painful. coldness ensued between mother and daughter, and lasted until the former happened to fall dangerously ill. Then Germaine's feelings underwent a revulsion of passionate tenderness; and in the touching recon

ciliation which ensued between parent and child, Mr. Pitt and his suit were forgotten.

Prince George Augustus of Mecklenburg was even less fortunate, being refused by both Monsieur and Madame Necker, with a promptitude which he fully deserved. For he had nothing to recommend him but his conspicuous position, and had very impudently avowed that he sought Mademoiselle Necker's hand only for the sake of her enormous dower.

The ground being thus cleared for Madame de Bouffler's protégé, that energetic lady set to work to obtain from Gustavus a promise not to remove the Baron, now ambassador, from France for a specified long term of years.

This assurance that they would not be parted from their daughter having been given to the Neckers, and formally embodied in a clause of the marriage settlement, the document was signed by the King and Queen of France, and several other illustrious personages, and the wedding celebrated on the 14th January 1776.

The first few days after her marriage, Madame de Staël, according to the custom of the time, passed under her father's roof; and among her letters is a sweet and affectionate one, which she addressed to her mother on the last day of her sojourn with her parents.

Perhaps I have not always acted rightly towards you, Mamma," she writes. "At this moment, as in that of death, all my deeds are present to my mind, and I fear that I may not leave in you the regret that I desire. But deign to believe that the phantoms of imagination have often fascinated my eyes, and often come between you and me so as to render me unre

cognizable. But the very depth of my tenderness makes me feel at this moment that it has always been the same. It is part of my life, and I am entirely shaken and unhinged in this hour of separation from you. Tonight. . . . I shall not have in my house the angel that guaranteed it from thunder and fire. I shall not have her who would protect me if I were dying, and would enfold me, before God, with the rays of her sublime soul. I shall not have at every moment news of your health. I foresee regrets at every instant. I pray that I may be worthy of you. come later, at intervals or never.

Happiness may

The end of life ter

minates everything, and you are so sure that there is another life as to leave no doubt in my heart. Accept, Mamma, my dear Mamma, my profound respect and boundless tenderness."

Perhaps when Madame Necker read this letter, she felt in part consoled for the real or fancied pain which her brilliant and unaccountable daughter had given her.

And in spite of passing dissensions with her mother, Germaine's twenty years of girlhood had been essentially happy, for they had been tenderly and watchfully sheltered from blight or harm.

CHAPTER IV.

NECKER'S SHORT-LIVED TRIUMPH.

SOME spiteful ridicule awaited the young ambassadress on her first entrance into official life, and, strangely enough, among these detractors was Madame de Boufflers herself, who wrote to Gustavus III.: "She has been virtuously brought up, but has no knowledge of the world or its usages. . . and has a degree of assurance that I never saw equalled at her age, or in any position. If she were less spoilt by the incense offered up to her, I should have tried to give her a little advice." Another courtier's soul was vexed because Madame de Staël, when presented on her marriage, tore her flounce, and thus spoilt her third curtsey. As much scandal was caused by this gaucherie as if it had been some newly-invented sin; but the delinquent herself, when the heinousness of her conduct was communicated to her, simply laughed. She could, indeed, afford to despise all such censure, for, if too obstreperously intellectual and ardent for artificial circles, she soon attained to immense influence among all the thinking and quasi-thinking minds. of France.

Politics were now beginning to be the one absorbing subject whose paramount importance dwarfed every other; and Madame de Staël, always in the vanguard of ideas, threw herself with characteristic enthusiasm into the questions of the day. To talk about the glorious future of humanity was the fashionable cant of the hour, but Madame de Staël really believed in the regeneration about which others affectedly maundered; and at all social gatherings in the Rue Bergère, or at St. Ouen (where her presence was as frequent as of yore), she held forth on this subject to the crowd of dazzled listeners, whom she partially convinced and wholly overpowered.

She had been married but little more than a year when the first shadow of coming events dimmed the lustre of her new existence. In a speech pronounced at the Assembly of Notables in April 1787, M. de Calonne impugned the accuracy of the famous Compte Rendu. M. Necker indignantly demanded from the King the permission to hold a public debate on the subject, in the presence of the Assembly before which he had been accused. Louis XVI. refused; and M. Necker then immediately published a memoir of selfjustification. The result was a lettre de cachet which exiled him to within forty leagues of Paris. The order, conveyed by Le Noir, the Minister of Police, reached M. Necker in the evening, when he was sitting in his wife's salon, surrounded by his daughter and some friends. The liveliness of Madame de Staël's indignation may be imagined. She has described it herself in her Considérations sur la Révolution Française, and declared that the King's decision appeared to her an unexampled act of despotism. Its parallel would not have been far to seek,