A few years earlier the Abbé Galiani, delightful and incorrigible, would also have been seen. This extraordinary little man, political economist, archæologist, mineralogist, diplomatist and pulcinello, was one of Madame Necker’s professed adorers. Everybody liked and admired him; Diderot described him as “a treasure on a rainy day”; Marmontel as “the prettiest little harlequin,” with “the head of Macchiavelli”; while, for Madame Geoffrin, he was her _petite chose_. After so much praise, and from such people, Madame Necker must certainly have accepted him unconditionally; but it would be interesting to know exactly with what air she listened to his impassioned declarations. When eventually restored to his native land—or, as he expressed it, exiled from Paris—he wrote her impudent and characteristic epistles, in which reproaches at her virtue, intimate interrogations regarding her health, and envy of M. Necker’s happiness, mingled with inquiries after everybody in the beloved capital, and wails of inconsolable grief at his own departure. “_Quel désert que cinquante mille Napolitains!_” he exclaims. Madame Du Deffand was also for a time an intimate guest at the Neckers’. The friendship did not last long. The marquise, by this time infinitely weary of men and things, appears soon to have tired of Madame Necker’s declamations and M. Necker’s superiority. Her final judgment on the wife was very severe, rather ill-tempered, and therefore unjust. Madame Necker was, she says, “stiff and frigid, full of self-consciousness, but an upright woman.” Her liking for the husband held out longer, but finally succumbed to the discovery that, while very intelligent, he failed to elicit wit from others. “One felt oneself more stupid in his company than when with other people or alone.” There is no trace of any variation in the friendship between Madame Necker and Madame Geoffrin. Perhaps the latter, with her habitual gentle “_Voilà, qui est bien_,” called her young friend to order, and early repressed the emphatic praises which could not but have wearied her.