Madame Necker's moral stigma and suffering were physically imprinted on her body. Her husband and first biographer, Jacques Necker, cited her extensive physical debilitation, noting that:

This theme of continual suffering is later taken up in the portrait penned by Laure Junot, Duchesse d'Abrantès, in the six-volume Histoire des salons de Paris, her monumental paean to aristocratic sociability and sensibility. In the first chapter, entitled, ‘Salon de Madame Necker. 1787’, Madame Necker emerges, perhaps unsurprisingly, as a somewhat stiff woman little prone to outward displays of affection. Most of all, however, she appears pale and weak, a woman consumed by suffering, who was ‘beautiful nevertheless, as much as one could be with that deathly pallor that covered her face, and in which the eternal look in her eyes confirmed the sad truth’.