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 Recamier
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 Recamier, 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, those 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 wei