In the Estates-General of France to which Stendhal refers, there were three houses: one for the aristocracy, one for the clergy and a third for everyone else. The tripartite division in Coppet was rather different. Apart from the members of Madame de Staël's immediate family, there were first of all the visiting English, to many of whom she was returning the hospitality she had enjoyed during her recent stay in their country. There were then the local intellectuals of a liberal cast and, finally, a fair sprinkling of princes, dukes, and titled dignitaries from continental Europe. The châtelaine of Coppet had a weakness for titles, to which she would readily admit – it cannot have harmed her warm feeling for Byron that he was a lord. Not having the same anxiety as her parents about an alliance with a Catholic, she had recently married her daughter, Albertine, into one of the most aristocratic families in France. Part of the reason she could do this was that, when in 1790 her father was forced to resign as French finance minister, he left behind in the Treasury a loan of two million francs as a gesture of confidence in the country he had served so conscientiously. Madame de Staël spent fifteen years trying to recover these two millions and only finally did so when Louis XVIII was restored to the French throne. Her daughter's most promising suitor, the Duke de Broglie, faded a little into the background during the hundred days but once Louis was again in Paris, and it was clear that the money would still be part of Albertine's dowry, he was ready to make her his duchess.