At fifteen years of age she began to write essays, novels, and tragedies. One of her tragedies, entitled _Montmorency_, marks the time when she began to feel attracted by the young Vicomte Mathieu de Montmorency, who had distinguished himself in the American War of Independence. Her parents being opposed to her marriage with a Catholic, she was obliged to refuse his hand, but to the end of their lives they remained faithful friends. Yielding to her mother's wishes, Germaine Necker married in 1786 the Swedish Ambassador in Paris, Baron Erik Magnus Staël Holstein, a favourite of Gustavus the Third. In order to assist him to this wealthy and influential connection, Gustavus confirmed the Baron in his post of ambassador in Paris for a certain number of years. The bridegroom, who was double the age of his bride, promised her parents that he would never take her to Sweden against her will. He seems to have been the ordinary northern nobleman of the period, very simple, polished in manner, but only half educated, a spendthrift and a gambler. It was said of him that he would never have found out how to boil a potato, much less have invented gunpowder. Curiously enough, he sympathised with the Revolution. Mme. de Staël's first book, _Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau_, was published immediately before the Revolution. It is a panegyric and a defence. At the close of the third letter she seeks to interweave Rousseau's fame with that of her father, who, at the time she wrote, had just been called to the head of affairs; at the end of the fourth she hails the assembling of the States-General with youthful enthusiasm, and expresses the hope that the great French nation will attain by the path of enlightenment, reason, and peace, to the possession of those blessings which other peoples had gained by the shedding of streams of blood. She calls upon the nation to make it a matter of honour not to go beyond the point which all are united in regarding as their aim, and she closes with an apostrophe to Rousseau, in which she laments that he did not live long enough to see the approaching awe-inspiring spectacle, nor to encourage that patriot, Necker, who merited a judge, admirer, and fellow-citizen such as he. [Illustration: MADAME DE STAËL]