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, as a woman, to captivate people's minds, I was ignorant how many shades there are of self-love, and I offended it when I thought I was flattering it.