Madame de Stael. Oil on canvas. 116 x 83. Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, commonly known as Madame de Staël, was a French woman of letters and historian of Genevan origin whose lifetime overlapped with the events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. For many years she lived as an exile under the Reign of Terror and under Napoleonic persecution. Known as a witty and brilliant conversationalist, often dressed in flashy and revealing outfits, she participated actively in the political and intellectual life of her times. She was present at the Estates General of 1789 and at the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Her intellectual collaboration with Benjamin Constant between 1795 and 1811 made them one of the most celebrated intellectual couples of their time. They discovered sooner than others the tyrannical character and designs of Napoleon. In 1814 one of her contemporaries observed that there are three great powers struggling against Napoleon for the soul of Europe: England, Russia, and Madame de Staël. Her works, both novels and travel literature, with emphasis on passion, individuality and oppositional politics made their mark on European Romanticism. Germaine was the only child of Swiss-born Suzanne Curchod, who hosted in Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin one of the most popular salons of Paris and prominent Genevan banker and statesman Jacques Necker, who was the Director-General of Finance under King Louis XVI of France. Mme Necker wanted her daughter educated according to the principles of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and endow her with the intellectual education and Calvinist discipline instilled in her by her pastor father. On Friday's she regularly brought Germaine as a young child to sit at her feet in her salon, where the guests took pleasure in stimulating the brilliant child. At the age of 13, she read Montesquieu, Shakespeare, Rousseau and Dante. This exposure occasioned a nervous breakdown in adolescence, but the seeds of a literary vocation had been sown. Her father is remembered today for taking the unprecedented step in 1781 of making public the country's budget, a novelty in an absolute monarchy where the state of finances had always been kept a secret, leading to his dismissal in May. The family eventually took up residence in 1784 at Château Coppet, an estate her father purchased on Lake Geneva. The family returned to the Paris region in 1785, and Mlle Necker continued to write miscellaneous works, including the three-act romantic drama Sophie and the five-act tragedy, Jeanne Grey. Aged 11, Germaine proposed to her mother to marry Edward Gibbon, who was fancied by her mother. Then he would always be around for her. In 1783, she was courted by William Pitt the Younger and by the fop Comte de Guibert, whose conversation, she thought, was the most far-ranging, spirited and fertile she had ever known. When she did not accept their offers Germaine's parents became impatient. Finally, a marriage was arranged with Baron Erik Magnus Staël von Holstein, an attaché of the Swedish legation to France. It took place on 14 January 1786 in the Swedish embassy at 97, Rue du Bac; Germaine was 20, her husband 37. On the whole, the marriage seems to have been acceptable to both parties, although neither seems to have had any or little affection for the other. The baron, a gambler, obtained great benefits as he received 80,000 pounds and was confirmed as lifetime ambassador to Paris, although his wife was almost certainly the more effective envoy. In 1788, she published Letters on the works and character of J.J. Rousseau. In this fervid panegyric, at first written for a limited number of friends, she demonstrated evident talent, but little in the way of critical discernment. De Staël was at this time enthusiastic about a mixture of Rousseau's ideas about love and Montesquieu in politics. In December 1788 her father instigated the king to double the number of deputies from the Third Estate in order to gain enough support for raising the taxes as the support the revolutionaries in America had been too costly. This approach had serious repercussions on Necker's reputation; he appeared to consider the Estates-General to be a facility designed to help the administration rather than to reform government. In an argument with the king, whose speech on 23 June he didn't attend, Necker was dismissed and exiled on 11 July. On Sunday, 12 July the news became public and an angry Camille Desmoulins suggested the storming of the Bastille. On 16 July he was reappointed; Necker entered Versailles in triumph. His efforts to clean up public finances were unsuccessful and his idea of a National Bank failed.