of whom he said that the charm of her presence laid his sorrows to sleep; who, after being the soul of his most elevated and delicate inspirations, became in later years the providence of every moment of his life." Ballanche himself often assured Madame Récamier, that the ideal of the "Antigone" of his dreams was revealed to him by her, and that, in drawing this perfect portrait, he had copied largely from her. "It was only through Eurydice," he writes, "that Orpheus had any mission for his brother-men. If my name survives me, as appears more and more probable, I shall be called the Philosopher of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, and my philosophy will be considered as inspired by you. This thought is my joy. I am now entering on the last stage of my life: however prolonged this stage may be, I know well what is at the end of it. I shall fall asleep in the bosom of a great hope, full of confidence that your memory and mine will live the same life." Fortunate friends! happy in their living union immaculate as heaven, happy in the grateful admiration and love of all fit souls who shall ever read of them!

And if he grieved because his words, his name,
The breath of after-ages will not stir,
'Tis but because he would impart his fame,
And share an immortality with her;

So might there, from the brightest, holiest flame
That e'er did martyrdom of heart confer,
Two shadowy forms of Truth and Friendship rise,
To seek their home together in the skies.

Pervading and earnest, however, as were these attachments of Madame Récamier to Montmorency and Ballanche, the crowning passion of her life was her friendship for Chateaubriand. This grand writer and imposing person has described his first meeting with her:

"I was one morning with Madame de Staël, who, at toilet in the hands of her maid, twirled a green twig in her fingers while she talked. Suddenly Madame Récamier entered, clothed in white. She sits down on a blue-silk sofa. Madame de Staël, standing, continues her eloquent conversation. I scarcely reply, my eyes riveted on Madame Récamier. I had never seen any one equal to her, and was more than ever depressed. My admiration of her changed into dissatisfaction with myself. She went out, and I saw her no more for twelve years. Twelve years! What hostile power squanders thus our days, ironically lavishing them on the indifferences called attachments, on the wretchednesses named felicities!"

But it was in 1817, at a private dinner in the chamber of the dying Madame de Staël, that their real acquaintance began. The literary fame of Chateaubriand was then greater than that of any living man. He was a lofty, romantic, melancholy person, with a superb head and face, polished manners, and a grand vein of eloquence. Nothing was so deeply characteristic of Madame Récamier as her enthusiasm for brilliant minds, noble sentiment and conduct. It was this that had so fascinated her with Madame de Staël. The sure proof of the ideal nature of her attachments, their freedom from sensual ingredients, is this ruling stamp of reverence and loyalty. Those whom she admired the most enthusiastically she loved the most passionately. It could hardly fail that her imagination would be captivated with the chivalrous and imposing Chateaubriand, especially at such an affecting time. "He seemed the natural heir to Madame de Staël's place in her heart." Speaking of this overwhelming sentiment, thirty years later, she said, "It is impossible for a head to be more completely turned than mine was: I used to cry all day." Montmorency and Ballanche were greatly distressed, and not a little mortified and jealous. It was not that they had fallen into a lower and narrower place in her affection, but that they saw Chateaubriand installed in a higher and larger place. They feared that her peace would be wrecked in wretchedness by an intimate connection with one so discontented and capricious, - a sort of spoilt idol, a hero of ennui, filled with causeless melancholy, voracious of praise, querulous, exacting, his own imperious and inevitable personality ever uppermost. In vain they sought to warn and dissuade her from the new attachment. Montmorency seems to have fancied that the passion was not friendship, but love; and faithfully, with solemn energy, he adjured her, by all the sanctions of religion, to guard herself. He soon learned his error, and gracefully apologized:

"When I read your perfect letter, lovely friend, remorse seized me, and now fills my soul. I am deeply touched by the proofs of your friendship, and by the triumphs of your reason. I am, for friendship's sake, proud of the exclusive privilege you accord to me of admission and consolation, and impatiently long to go and exercise the sweet right. Pardon me my letter of this morning. Adieu. Persist in your generous resolutions, and turn to Him who alone can strengthen them and reward them."

The friendship of Madame Récamier and Chateaubriand became more absorbing and complete, and was destined to endure with their lives. "It was," Madame Lenormant says, "the one aim of her life to appease the irritability, soothe the susceptibilities, and remove the annoyances of this noble, generous, but selfish nature, spoiled by too much adulation." Her steady moderation, moral wisdom, beautiful repose, and sweet oblivion of self, were an admirable antidote to his extreme moods, uneasy vanity, and morbid depression. Communion with her serene equity, her matchless beauty, her inexhaustible tenderness, the experience of her constant homage, soothed his haughty and mordant, but magnanimous and affectionate, nature, and were an infinite luxury to him. An admiring recognition is almost a necessity for those highly endowed with genius. And Madame Récamier's intense faculty of admiration, with her self-forgetting devotedness, exactly fitted her for this ministry. Chateaubriand became the first object of her life. Modifying her habits to suit his tastes, she made him, instead of herself, the centre around which every thing was to revolve. She devised endless means of lending an interest to his existence. She listened to every thing he wrote. She drew into her parlor, to meet him, all those persons who could interest or amuse him, or in any way give him pleasure. She diverted attentions from herself to him with exhaustless skill and generosity.

Such jealousy as can find a place in natures so noble is easily to be traced in the letters of Ballanche and Montmorency. Chateaubriand calls Ballanche "the hierophant" or "the mysterious initiator," " the man the most advanced at the

Abbaye-aux-Bois." Ballanche, in turn, calls Chateaubriand "the king of intelligence." But Madame Récamier's wonderful sweetness and discretion invariably restored the interrupted harmony. Nor, indeed, did she allow the superior attraction to cast her old friends in the shade. Several years after the death of Montmorency, which happened in church on a Good Friday, Chateaubriand wrote to her thus: "Yesterday I believed myself dying, as your best friend did. Then you would have found one resemblance at least between us, and perhaps you would have joined us in your heart." Five years after their first meeting, Chateaubriand, then ambassador at Berlin, writes to her, "That I shall see you in a month, seems a kind of dream to me." Twenty-five years later, two years before his death, he writes to her at a watering-place whither she had gone for her health, "Do not hasten back. I pass my time here in Notre Dame. It is well occupied; for I think only of you and of God." The persistence of an affection so profound and so pure as that of Madame Récamier bore its proper fruit, and ended by subduing Chateaubriand. Gratitude, respect, veneration, struck their roots to the very bottom of his heart. Little by little his self-occupied personality yields, and at last he writes to her, "You have transformed my nature." When she was alarmingly ill, in the winter of 1837, he, together with Ballanche, might be seen in the cold mornings, - "his beautiful white hair blown about by the wind, his physiognomy the image of despair," - in the court of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, waiting for the doctor to come out. He then writes, "I bring this note to your door. I was so terrified yesterday at not being admitted, that I believed you were going from me. Ah! remember it is I who am to go before you. Never speak of what I shall do without you. I have not done any thing so evil that I should be left behind you."

She recovered, and devoted herself more than ever, if possible, through the years of his mental decay, to alleviate and

disguise the sad changes that came over him. Blindness began their separation before death came. Nothing can more emphatically bespeak her divine self-abnegation than the fact, that, for a long time after she had become perfectly blind, a dislike to trouble others with her infirmities led her to conceal the misfortune from her general acquaintance. Her eyes kept their brightness, and her hearing was most acute: she recognized, by the first inflection of the voice, those who drew near. The furniture was carefully arranged, always in the same way, so that she could move about confidently; and many persons, when she spoke of her "poor eyes," never dreamed that she had actually lost her sight.

After the decease of his wife, Chateaubriand besought Madame Récamier to marry him. She refused, on the ground, that, if she resided with him, the variety and pleasure his daily visits brought into the tedium of his existence would be destroyed. "Were we younger," she said, "I would gladly accept the right to consecrate my life to you. Age and blindness give me this right. I know the world will do justice to the purity of our relation. Let us change nothing." During his last sickness, he was as unable to speak as she was to see. She had the fortitude to undergo two operations on her eyes in the hope of looking on him once more; but in vain. By his bedside when he expired, she felt the sources of her life struck. She came from the room with no outward sign of distress, but clothed with a deadly paleness, which from that hour never left her. Her niece wrote at the time to a friend in England:

"Those who, during the last two years, have seen Madame Récamier, blind, though the sweetness and brilliancy of her eyes remained uninjured, surrounding the illustrious friend whose age had extinguished his memory, with cares so delicate, so tender, so watchful, who have seen her joy when she helped him to snatch a momentary distraction from the conversation around him, by leading it to subjects connected with that past which still lingered in his memory, persons will never forget the scene. They could not help being deeply affected with pity and respect at the sight of that noble beauty, brilliancy, and genius bending beneath the weight of age,