Madame Necker appears to have led a charmed existence. Her meteoric social ascension from impoverished orphan to esteemed socialite and philanthropist is the stuff of fairy tales. Suzanne had it all: beauty, brains, virtue and the coveted prize, a wealthy and politically powerful husband. It seemed almost too good to be true. Her precipitous flight from Paris during the early days of the French Revolution, followed by her tragic, premature death and spectacular burial, recall the final years of another otherwise charmed life – that of Diana, Princess of Wales – and would appear to be the only fitting end for a woman doomed to a life lived in the public gaze, a gaze she alternately courted and despised. Such indeed is the narrative outlined by her numerous biographers.

The bare bones of Madame Necker's life story, as we know them, are relatively straightforward. Suzanne Curchod was born in the Swiss village of Crassier, near the French border, on 2 June 1737. Hers was a family of modest means and moral rectitude: her father was a Calvinist minister and her mother a Huguenot exile who had fled France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.