'Mademoiselle, may you be happier than I can ever hope to be! This will always be my prayer; this will even be my consolation.... Assure M. and Madame Curchod of my respect, my esteem, and my regrets. Good-bye. I shall always remember Mademoiselle Curchod as the most worthy, the most charming, of women. May she not entirely forget a man who does not deserve the despair to which he is a prey.'

Even this, however, was not the end of the story, though one would think it was if one had only Gibbon's narrative to go by. In 1763 he revisited Lausanne, and his own story of his sojourn does not so much as mention Mademoiselle Curchod's name. One would gather from it either that he did not see her, or that love had already on both sides 'subsided in friendship and esteem.' But when the Vicomte d'Haussonville was given access to the archives of the Necker family, he found letters proving that this was not by any means the case.

Mademoiselle Curchod's father was then dead, and she was living at Geneva, supporting her mother by teaching. Some of her friends—notably Pastor Moultou—tried to bring Gibbon to a sense of the obligations which they felt he owed to her. Rousseau was brought into the business, and expressed an opinion which led Gibbon to retort, 'That extraordinary man, whom I admire and pity, should have been less precipitate in condemning the moral character and conduct of a stranger.' It is useless, however, to try to piece the whole story together—the materials are inadequate. One can only take the letters which the Vicomte d'Haussonville has published, and which, as he points out, are by no means the whole of the correspondence, and see what sidelights they throw upon it.

First we have one of Mademoiselle Curchod's letters. Whether she wrote it because she had met Gibbon and found his manner towards her changed, or was perplexed and troubled because he had not sought a meeting, we have no means of knowing. But it is quite clear that she wrote it under the sense of having been treated badly.

'For five years,' she writes, 'I have, by my unique and, indeed, inconceivable behaviour, done sacrifice to this chimera. At last my heart, romantic as it is, has been convinced of my mistake. I ask you, on my knees, to dissuade me from my madness in loving you. Subscribe the full confession of your indifference, and my soul will adapt itself to the changed conditions; certainty will bring me the tranquillity for which I sigh. You will be the most contemptible of men if you refuse to be frank with me. God will punish you, in spite of my prayers, if there is the least hypocrisy in your reply.'

The reply is lost. Mademoiselle Curchod presumably destroyed it because it pained her. Apparently it contained a proposal of Platonic friendship as a substitute for love. At all events, Mademoiselle Curchod's answer seems to accept that situation, whether with ulterior designs or not, for it begins:

'What is fortune to me? Besides, it is not to you that I have sacrificed it, but to an imaginary being which will never exist elsewhere than in a silly, romantic head like mine. From the moment when your letter disillusioned me, you resumed your place, in my eyes, on the same footing as other men; and, after being the only man whom I could love, you have become one of those to whom I feel the least drawn, because you are the one that bears the least resemblance to my chimerical ideal.... Follow out the plan that you propose, place your attachment for me on the same footing as that of my other friends, and you will find me as confiding, as tender, and, at the same time, as indifferent as I am to them.'

And the writer proceeds to take up the Platonic position at once, to criticize Gibbon's first essay in literature, to offer him useful introductions, and to ask him to advise her whether she would be likely to be well treated if she took a situation as 'lady companion' in England.

Even in this Platonic correspondence, however, Gibbon, with a prudence beyond his years, seems to have scented danger.

'Mademoiselle,' he wrote, 'must you be for ever pressing upon me a happiness which sound reason compels me to decline? I have forfeited your love. Your friendship is left to me, and it bestows so much honour upon me that I cannot hesitate. I accept it, mademoiselle, as a precious offering in exchange for my own friendship, which is already yours, and as a blessing of which I know the value too well to be disposed to lose it.

'But this correspondence, mademoiselle, I am sensible of the pleasures which it brings me, but, at the same time, I am conscious of its dangers. I feel the dangers that it has for me; I fear the dangers that it may have for both of us. Permit me to avoid those dangers by my silence. Forgive my fears, mademoiselle; they have their origin in my esteem for you.'

And he proceeded to answer her questions concerning the position and prospects of 'lady companions' in England, expecting, no doubt, that he would hear no more from her.

Even then, however, the story was not ended. The most passionate of Mademoiselle Curchod's letters bears a later date. It is the letter of a woman who feels that she has been treated shamefully. If it were not that Mademoiselle Curchod made a happy marriage so very soon afterwards, one would also say that it was the letter of a woman whose heart was broken. One gathers from it that, while Mademoiselle Curchod appreciated Gibbon's difficulty in marrying her while he was dependent upon his father, she was willing to wait for him until his father's death should leave him free to follow the impulse of his heart. In the meantime she reproaches him for having caused her to reject other offers of marriage, and protests that it is not true, whatever calumnious gossips may have said, that, in Gibbon's absence, she has flirted with other men. Above all, she protests that she has not flirted with Gibbon's great friend, M. Deyverdun. Her last words are:

'I am treating you as an honest man of the world, who is incapable of breaking his promise, of seduction, or of treachery, but who has, instead of that, amused himself in racking my heart with tortures, well prepared, and well carried into effect. I will not threaten you, therefore, with the wrath of heaven—the expression that escaped from me in my first emotion. But I assure you, without laying any claim to the gift of prophecy, that you will one day regret the irreparable loss that you have incurred in alienating for ever the too frank and tender heart of

'S. C.'