Staël, Germaine de

Germaine Staël von Holstein, best known as Madame de Staël, was a French author born in Paris as Ann Louise Germaine Necker, the daughter of the Swiss-French banker and politician Jacques Necker and his Swiss wife Suzanne Curchod Necker. The latter hosted one of the most brilliant literary salons of the late 18th century where Enlightenment philosophers such as Diderot and d'Alembert were able to admire the verbal skills of the young, intelligent Germaine who, throughout her peripatetic life, came to host an itinerant, cosmopolitan salon that attracted all the great writers, philosophers and politicians of her time including Goethe, Lord Byron, Chateaubriand, the Schlegel brothers and Benjamin Constant, with whom she one of the most verbose love affairs in recorded history.