Page:Every Woman's Encyclopedia Volume 1.djvu/737

 709 BKAUTY extant, to hold the plate in church for a special charitable object. The church was filled to overflowing, people standing even on the side altars to catch a view of her as she knelt holding the plate, and in imminent danger of being crushed to death by the crowd. Before long she was the very heart of political society in brilliant Paris. She blos- somed into one of those rare hostesses who can always draw the best from everyone. The admiration she received did not turn her head, and although she had no deep religious principles at that time, she had a sweet and loving nature, and was well guided by close and earnest friends of both sexes. Her greatest friend Was Madame de Stael, and this friendship was never broken till death gathered in the author of " Corinne." It for women, and he was destined to be the only man who captured the real heart of beautiful Juliette. For two years from the death of Madame de Stael her two greatest friends became ever closer united in the bonds of mutual affection and mutual interests and influence. In 1 819, when Chateaubriand was fifty, and Madame R6camier was forty, and still very beautiful and more popular than ever. Monsieur R6camier lost his money. It became necessary to retrench, and Madame R&:amier seized the opportunity of leaving her husband without scandal. She felt that Chateau- briand took the first place in her life. It is a sign of her nature that, at this point in her life, the way she took Was to retire to semi- obscurity in the outskirts of a convent, where her husband visited her daily, and Madame Recamier, who ruled French society for thirty'four years. " Her anielic face can bear no oth. to bind your hsart to her for ever," said Lamartine. Front tke famous painting by David lasted through exile and persecution, and Madame Recamier's own exile sprang directly from her daring to visit her friend when the latter Was under Napoleon's displeasure. Her life was full of brilliant and dramatic chapters, but perhaps the most outstanding of all was that in which Chateaubriand figured ; and it also shows the glorious qualities of her nature better than the others. She had met the famous writer casually in society, and some years later renewed his acquaintance at the death-bed of Madame de Stael. That circumstance alone was suffi- cient to give him a special interest in her eyes, and as for him, he Was no exception to the rule that " to see her Was to love her." H3 was egotistic, vain, ambitious, and melancholy, but he always had an attraction Chateaubriand also, to say nothing of her other friends. The Abbaye-aux-Bois was only pulled down in 1908. The writer stayed there, just before its demolition, in a suite of rooms on the second floor, whose red-tiled floors had a depression worn in them where pious women had paced up and down meditating during three centuries. The outer part of the convent Was built round a paved courtyard — the one where Chateaubriand and Bal- lanche paced up and down, anxiously waiting for news of their adored friend when she was ill. All the rooms were small and bare, but Madame Recamier brightened them with flowers, and, on the faith of one who spent five delicious weeks there, there are worse places than Was the old Abbaye-aux-Bjis.