"All for love" is a very pretty maxim, but it is apt to entail trouble when practically applied.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had the most beautiful sentiments on paper, but who in real life was not always a model of self-denial, found, as we shall see, grave fault with Gibbon's conduct.

Gibbon, as a plain man of rather prosaic good sense, behaved neither heroically nor meanly.
Time, absence, and the scenes of a new life, which he found in England, had their usual effect; his passion vanished.

"My cure," he says, "was accelerated by a faithful report of the tranquillity and cheerfulness of the lady herself, and my love subsided in friendship and esteem." The probability, indeed, that he and Mdlle.

Curchod would ever see each other again, must have seemed remote in the extreme.
Europe and England were involved in the Seven Years War; he was fixed at home, and an officer in the militia; Switzerland was far off: when and where were they likely to meet?
They did, contrary to all expectation, meet again, and renewed terms not so much of friendship as of affection.Mdlle.Curchod, as the wife of Necker, became somewhat of a celebrity, and it is chiefly owing to these last-named circumstances that the world has ever heard of Gibbon's early love.
While he was at Lausanne Gibbon made the acquaintance of Voltaire, but it led to no intimacy or fruitful reminiscence.