‘Happy through the happiness she gives her husband, happy through the education she gives her children, happy through the effect of her example on those around her, happy through the consolation she finds in her trust in her God": such is Julie, the “new Heloise”, portrayed by Germaine in her “Lettres sur J.-J. Rousseau” (Œuvres de jeunesse, p. 55). When she wrote this marital eulogy of feminine self-giving, the young woman had just taken the name of Baron de Staël Hofstein. But whereas Germaine Necker had imagined that she could live with an equivalent of the placid Wolmar, it was a jealous, abusive and violent man that she came up against; the sacrifices freely made were quickly followed by disenchantment and bitterness. That was the end of the married life she had dreamed of in Rousseau's book. The search for happiness, so emblematic of the generations born with the Age of Enlightenment, would henceforth guide her outside legitimate conjugality. She was not alone in this, at least in her small, cosmopolitan and very wealthy circle. But beyond this narrow circle, albeit one with a broad, almost ‘mythical’ reputation, living together is a necessity for most married couples. An economic necessity, but also a paradigm that is spreading and turning a certain form of conjugality into a norm that we will refer to here as conjugalism.