style="font-size:15px;"> Suzanne was the president of this society. They used to discuss such questions as these: “Does an element of mystery make love more agreeable?” “Can there be a friendship between a man and a woman in the same way as between two women or two men?” and the like.
Suzanne seems to have been inclined to treat young theological students in somewhat the same way as fishermen play salmon when they are “killing” them. Her friends expostulated with her on her cruelty.
Gibbon, who had the reputation of being the son of a wealthy Englishman, caused her to forget the sighing students. At that time he must have been an attractive youth – that is, if we can put any confidence in her own description of him. After praising his beautiful hair and aristocratic hand, his air of good-breeding, and his intellectual face and his vivacity of expression, she crowns her encomium by declaring that he understood the respect due to women, and that his courtesy was easy without verging on familiarity. She adds: “He dances moderately well.”
They became affianced lovers. Years afterwards, Gibbon in his autobiography declared that he had no cause to blush at recollecting the object of his choice. “Though my love,” he says, “was disappointed of success, I am rather proud that I was once capable of feeling such a pure and exalted sentiment. The personal attractions of Mademoiselle Susan Curchod were embellished by the virtues and talents of her mind. Her fortune was humble, but her family was respectable.”
He visited at her parents’ home – “happy days,” he called them – in the mountains of Burgundy, and the connection was honourably encouraged. She seems to have made it a condition of her engagement that he should always live in Switzerland. When he returned to England in 1758 he found that his father opposed the match, and evidently his love speedily cooled. The absence of letters does not necessarily prove that none were written, but certainly there was no lively correspondence, and at length, after a lapse of four years, he calmly informs the young lady that he must renounce her for ever, and he lays the blame on his father, who, he says, considered it cruelty to desert him and send him prematurely to the grave, and cowardice to trample underfoot his duty to his country.
Considering the fact that Father Gibbon was busily engaged in dissipating his fortune, and had endured his son’s absence for many years, this excuse strikes one as decidedly thin. At the end of his letter of renunciation he desires to be remembered to Suzanne’s father and mother. Pastor Curchod had been dead two years, and Suzanne was then living in Geneva, where she was supporting herself and her mother by teaching.
Just ten years after his first arrival at Lausanne, Gibbon made a visit there on that memorable journey to Rome which resulted in the writing of his history. He made no attempt to see Suzanne, who seems to have deceived herself with the hope that his indifference was only imaginary. She wrote him that for five years she had sacrificed to this chimera by her “unique and inconceivable behavior.” She begged him on her knees to convince her of her madness in loving him and to end her uncertainty.
She got a letter from him that brought her to her senses. She replied that she had sacrificed her happiness not to him but, rather, to an imaginary being which could have existed only in a silly, romantic brain like hers, and, having had her eyes opened, he resumed his place as a mere man with all other men; indeed, although she had so idealized him that he seemed to be the only man she could have ever loved, he was now least attractive to her because he bore the least possible resemblance to her chimerical ideal.
Gibbon chronicled in his diary in September, 1763, the receipt of one of Suzanne’s letters, and in questionable French he called her “a dangerous and artificial girl” (“une fille dangereux et artificielle”) and adds: – “This singular affair in all its details has been very useful to me; it has opened my eyes to the character of women and will long serve as a safeguard against the seductions of love.”
Suzanne was no Cassandra, either; the very next year she married the young Genevan banker, Jacques Necker, then minister for the Republic of Geneva at Paris.
About two years later Gibbon wrote to his friend, J. B. Holroyd: —
“The Curchod (Madame Necker) I saw in Paris. She was very fond of me, and the husband particularly civil. Could they insult me more cruelly? Ask me every evening to supper; go to bed and leave me alone with his wife. What an impertinent security! It is making an old lover of mighty little consequence. She is as handsome as ever; seems pleased with her fortune rather than proud of it.”
The Platonic friendship was never again ruffled; if anything it grew more confidential and almost sentimental. The Neckers visited Gibbon in London more than once, and, when political and financial storms drove them from Paris, Gibbon found their Barony of Copet (as he spells it – he was not very strong in spelling!) a most delightful harbour, though he was too indolent to go there very often. This was in after years, when Lausanne again became his home.
He had published the first volume of his history of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” and had immediately leaped into fame. The same year Necker was made Director of the Treasury of France, and began that remarkable career of success and disappointment. Perhaps his greatest glory was his daughter, afterwards so well known as Madame de Staël, whose loyalty to him in all the vicissitudes of his life was one of her loveliest characteristics.
Gibbon was back in Lausanne again in 1783; he seems to have reckoned time in lustrums, his dates there being 1753, 1763 and 1783, and he returned to London in 1793 where he died the following year, just a century after Voltaire was born. He certainly had pleasant memories of Lausanne and, after losing his one public office, and the salary which came in so handy, he formed what his friends called the mad project of taking up his permanent residence there. This came about through his old-time friend, Georges Deyverdun, who through the death of relatives and particularly of an aristocratic old aunt, had come into possession of the estate known as La Grotte, one of the most interesting historical buildings in the town, with memories covering centuries of ecclesiastical history. He and Deyverdun formed a project whereby the two should combine their housekeeping resources and live in a sort of mutually dependent independence.
Gibbon had a very pretty wit. A year or two after he had taken this decisive step, had bade a long farewell to the “fumum et opes strepitumque Romae,” and had sold his property and moved with his books to Lausanne, the report reached London that the celebrated Mr. Gibbon, who had retired to Switzerland to finish his valuable history, was dead. Gibbon wrote his best friend, Holroyd, who was now Lord Sheffield: – “There are several weighty reasons which would incline me to believe that the intelligence may be true. Primo, It must one day be true; and therefore may very probably be so at present. Secundo, We may always depend on the impartiality, accuracy and veracity of an English newspaper.” – And so he goes on.
In another letter, after speaking of his old enemy, the gout, and assuring Sheffield that he had never regretted his exile, he pays his respects to his fellow-countrymen: “The only disagreeable circumstance,” he says, “is the increase of a race of animals with which this country has been long infested, and who are said to come from an island in the Northern Ocean. I am told, but it seems incredible, that upwards of forty thousand English, masters and servants, are now absent on the Continent.”
Byron, a third of a century later, had the same ill opinion of his fellow-countrymen: – “Switzerland,” he wrote Moore, “is a curst selfish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic regions of the world. I never could bear the inhabitants and still less their English visitors.”
In a somewhat different spirit Lord Houghton pays his respects to the throng of foreigners who find pleasure and recreation and health in Switzerland. He says: —
“Within the Switzer’s varied land
When Summer chases high the snow,
You’ll meet with many a youthful
