Benjamin Franklin Papers

To Benjamin Franklin from Jacques and Suzanne Necker, 21 March 1781

From Jacques and Suzanne Necker9

AL: American Philosophical Society

Ce 21 mars 1781

Mr et Mdme Necker prient Monsieur le Docteur de franckelin de leur faire l’honneur de diner chez eux vendredi 23 mars.1

[Note numbering follows the Franklin Papers source.]

9In 1764 Jacques Necker married Suzanne Curchod (1739–1794), who supported her husband’s political career by bringing together in her salon people of literary and political distinction. She also involved herself in a number of social projects, most notably the reform of prisons and hospitals in Paris: Jean Egret, Necker, ministre de Louis XVI, 1776–1790 (Paris, 1975), pp. 24–9, 60–1, 147, 151–8. Their daughter, Anne-Louise-Germaine (1766–1817), the famous writer known by her married name, baronne de Staël-Holstein, was a frequent presence at her mother’s salon even as a child and was a special friend of BF’s friend Mme d’Houdetot. At this time the family lived at the hôtel du Contrôle Général on the rue Neuve des Petits Champs and maintained a château in Saint-Ouen, north of Paris: Almanac royal for 1781, p. 210; Lewis, Walpole Correspondence, V, 388n; XI, 45n; Gabriel Paul O. de Cléron, comte d’Haussonville, The Salon of Madame Necker (Henry M. Trollope, trans., London, 1882), II, 23–7; illustrations facing p. 160 in Ghislain de Diesbach, Necker: ou, la Faillite de la Vertu (Paris, 1978).

1On the verso are some unrelated mathematical computations.

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