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It was then, in 1846, that the new company was constituted, with Buloz as managing director, and M. Molé, M. d'Haussonville, M. de Saint Priest, Count Roger, the duc de Broglie, M. de Rothschild, M. Baude and others as stockholders. A number of writers too were interested in the concern, and were to pay for their stock in the shape of contributions.
Necker, whose history has been made so familiar through the interesting memoirs of the Comte d'Haussonville, owes her fame to her marked qualities of intellect and character rather than to the brilliancy of her social talents. These found an admirable setting in the surroundings which her husband's fortune and political career gave her.
When Alexandre Dumas, the younger, was received into the French Academy in 1875, the Count d'Haussonville, who welcomed him, asserted that the elder Dumas, like Balzac, Beranger, de Lamennais and others, had preferred to remain an outsider. In the case of Balzac, the Count was mistaken. The so-called preference was Hobson's choice. He stayed outside only because he could not get in.
She was so happy. So important. I never met anybody who made me feel so insignificant. Madame d'Haussonville naturally suggests to the chronicler the sharpest sort of contrasts. I am told that she devoted herself to the world until the age of fifty, and she wielded a power and received a measure of adulation from both sexes that made her the most formidable social power in France.
Her inspiration thus came from without, throwing out those endless declamatory outbursts which we meet in Consuelo and in Comtesse de Rudolstadt. These theory-novels were soon followed by novels dealing with social problems, now and then relieved by delightful idyllics such as La Mare au Diable and François le Champi. This third tendency M. d'Haussonville considers the least successful.
Two novels, two stories, two historical works, and her memoirs, make up her literary budget. M. d'Haussonville claims that her memoirs of the court of France are not reliable, because she was so often absent from court; also, in them she shows a tendency to avenge herself, in a way, upon Mme. de Maintenon, whose friend she was until the trouble between this lady and Mme. de Montespan occurred.
In this living room is a large portrait of M. Necker, indeed, no room is without a portrait or bust of the idolized father, and here, looking strangely modern among faces of the First Empire, is a charming group of the four daughters of the Count d'Haussonville, the present owner of Coppet.
The evil influence of bad surroundings is well exemplified by an instance recorded by Viscount D'Haussonville in his work "L'Enfance a Paris": "Some years ago a band of criminals were brought before the jury of the Seine charged with a terrible crime, the assassination of an aged widow, with details of ferocity which the pen refuses to describe.
To-day, in four huge volumes of some thousand pages each, one may read the testimony, heart-sickening in every detail, a noted French political economist, the Comte d'Haussonville, describing it, in a recent article in "La Revue des deux Mondes" as "The Martyrology of English Industries." In such conditions inspection is inoperative.
I was told that she was now seventy; but she is a woman whose personality is so compelling that she rouses none of the usual vulgar curiosity as to the number of years she may have lingered on this planet. You see Madame d'Haussonville as she is and take not the least interest in what she may have been during the years before you happened to meet her.
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