ccessful in his enterprises; at forty he was a rich man, and his
banking-house enjoyed great credit when he retired from business, in
1772, in order to devote himself to occupations more in accordance with
his natural inclinations. He was ambitious and disinterested. The great
operations in which he had been concerned had made his name known. He
had propped up the _Compagnie des Indes_ nearly falling to pieces, and
his financial resources had often ministered to the necessities of the
State. "We entreat your assistance in the day of need," wrote Abbe
Terray when he was comptroller-general; "deign to come to our assistance
with a sum which is absolutely necessary." On ceasing to be a banker,
Necker soon gave indications of the direction in which his thoughts
turned; he wrote an indifferent Bloge de Colbert, crowned by the French
Academy, in 1773. He believed that he was destined to wear the mantle of
Louis XIV.'s great minister.

Society and public opinion exercised an ever increasing influence in the
eighteenth century; M. Necker managed to turn it to account. He had
married, in 1764, Mdlle. Suzanne Curchod, a Swiss pastor's daughter,
pretty, well informed, and passionately devoted to her husband, his
successes and his fame. The respectable talents, the liberality, the
large scale of living of M. and Madame Necker attracted round them the
literary and philosophical circle; the religious principles, the
somewhat stiff propriety of Madame Necker maintained in her drawing-room
an intelligent and becoming gravity which was in strong contrast with
the licentious and irreligious frivolity of the conversations customary
among the philosophers as well as the courtiers. Madame Necker paid
continuous and laborious attention to the duties of society. She was
not a Frenchwoman, and she was uncomfortably conscious of it. "When I
came to this country," she wrote to one of her fair friends, "I thought
that literature was the key to everything, that a man cultivated his
mind with books only, and was great by knowledge only." Undeceived by
the very fact of her admiration for her husband, who had not found
leisure to give himself up to his natural taste for literature, and who
remained rather unfamiliar with it, she made it her whole desire to be
of good service to him in the society in which she had been called upon
to live with him. "I hadn't a word to say in society," she writes; "I
didn't even know its language. Obliged,