Necker bought the property from his old banking partner, Thelusson, for 500,000 livres in French money, and retired to live there when the French Revolution drove him out of politics. His daughter, Madame de Staël, inherited it from him, and made it famous. Not that she loved Switzerland; it would be more true to say that she detested Switzerland. Swiss scenery meant nothing to her. When she was taken for an excursion to the glaciers, she asked what the crime was that she had to expiate by such a punishment; and she could look out on the blue waters of Lake Leman, and sigh for ‘the gutter of the Rue du Bac.’ Even to this day, the Swiss have hardly forgiven her for that, or for speaking of the Canton of Vaud as the country in which she had been ‘so intensely bored for such a number of years.’ What she wanted was to live in Paris, to be a leader--or, rather, to be _the_ leader--of Parisian society, to sit in a salon, the admired of all admirers, and to pull the wires of politics to the advantage of her friends. For a while she succeeded in doing this. It was she who persuaded Barras to give Talleyrand his political start in life. But whereas Barras was willing to act on her advice, Napoleon was by no means equally amenable to her influence. Almost from the first he regarded her as a mischief-maker; and when a spy brought him an intercepted letter in which Madame de Staël expressed her hope that none of the old aristocracy of France would condescend to accept appointments in the household of ‘the bourgeois of Corsica,’ he became her personal enemy, and, refusing her permission to live either in the capital or near it, practically compelled her to take refuge in her country seat. Her pleasaunce in that way became her gilded cage. Perhaps she was not quite so unhappy there as she sometimes represented. If she could not go to Paris, many distinguished and brilliant Parisians came to Coppet, and met there many brilliant and distinguished Germans, Genevans, Italians, and Danes. The Parisian salon, reconstituted, flourished on Swiss soil. There visited there, at one time or another, Madame Récamier and Madame Krüdner; Benjamin Constant, who was so long Madame de Staël’s lover; Bonstetten, the Voltairean philosopher; Frederika Brun, the Danish artist; Sismondi, the historian; Werner, the German poet; Karl Ritter, the German geographer; Baron de Voght; Monti, the Italian poet; Madame Vigée Le Brun; Cuvier; and Oelenschlaeger. From almost every one of them we have some pen-and-ink sketch of the life there. This, for instance, is the scene as it appeared to Madame Le Brun, who came to paint the hostess’s portrait: