Page "Germaine de Staël" Paragraph 2
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Her father was the prominent Swiss banker and statesman Jacques Necker, who was the Director of Finance under King Louis XVI of France.
Her mother was Suzanne Curchod, almost equally famous for being the early love of Edward Gibbon, being the wife of Necker herself, and being the mistress of one of the most popular salons of Paris.
Mme Necker, despite her talents, her beauty and her fondness for philosophic society, was strictly decorous, somewhat reserved, and wanted to bring up her daughter with the discipline of her own childhood.
But in reading all the accounts of Mme de Staël's life which come from herself or her intimate friends, it must be carefully remembered that she was the most distinguished and characteristic product of the period of sensibility — the singular fashion of ultra-sentimentalism — which required that both men and women, but especially women, should be always palpitating with excitement, steeped in melancholy, or dissolved in tears.
Still, her father's dismissal from the ministry and the consequent removal of the family from the busy life of Paris were probably beneficial to her.
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