Mistress of an Age

The first four chapters of Mistress of an Age describe the history and characters of Germaine de Stael's parents and her relations with them. Her father, Jacques Necker, was a Genevan banker and millionaire, widely considered a genius, thanks to her mother's devoted promotion of him through her exclusive intellectual salons. He was not a genius, but good with money and kind. She was........ She was intellectual, but very emotional; chaste, but coquettish; loving, but stern to her daughter. Suzanne decided to educate her daughter herself, and did so rigorously, under the delusion that she was doing so after the pattern set forth by Rousseau's Emile. Germaine's education was opposed to this pattern in every particular. She ended by hating her mother, and turning to her father for the affection and indulgence her mother refused, having been terrified by the desperation of her daughter's advances into utterly spurning them. Germaine and Suzanne were extremely similar in temperament, and mortally opposed to one another, competing for the affections of both Monsieur Necker and society. In the end, Germaine won society through effort, assisted by her marriage. Her father, however, became extremely devoted to his wife after her death, when it was perhaps somewhat easier to endure her society, embalmed as she was in a basin of alcohol, to be joined at his death by her husband, obeying her, through habit, even in death.