sipations of society and
its flatteries, sought a pure and lofty friendship, spiritual and
affectionate, with no improper intimacy. There was mutual admiration
and mutual respect. Even Chateaubriand's wife, who was an invalid and
with whom he spent every evening, encouraged his friendship with Mme.
Recamier. When, through the fall of Charles X., Chateaubriand lost his
power, the friendship did not cease. M. Turquan insists that he did
not really care seriously for Mme. Recamier, that his visits were the
outgrowth of mere habit. But it is to be seen that throughout his book
Turquan has little sympathy for his subject, whom he pictures as
a beautiful, heartless, intriguing woman with immense hands, flat,
square fingers, and large feet.

The influence possessed by Mme. Recamier was most remarkable; for
with the new statesmen, Thiers, Guizot, Mignet, De Tocqueville,
Sainte-Beuve, as well as the nobles and princes, she was on most
cordial terms, and was received in any salon which she chose to visit.
Her unbounded sympathy, tact, and common sense made her friendship
and counsel much in demand by great men. One trait, however, her
exclusiveness, caused much discomfort in her life, such as bringing
upon her the ill will of Napoleon.

In her later years her physical beauty gradually developed into a
moral beauty. She was never a passionate woman, but rather passively
affectionate; purely unselfish, her one desire always was to make
people love her and to be happy. Her friendship with Chateaubriand in
the later days was possibly the most ideal and noble in the history of
French women. He never failed to make his appearance in the afternoon
at the _abbaye_, driven in a carriage to her threshold, where he was
placed in an armchair and wheeled to a corner by her fireplace. On one
of those visits, he asked her to marry him--he being seventy-nine, she
seventy-one--and bear his illustrious name. "Why should we marry at
our age?" Mme. Recamier replied. "There is no impropriety in my taking
care of you. If solitude is painful to you, I am ready to live in the
same house with you. The world will do justice to the purity of our
friendship. Years and blindness give me this right. Let us change
nothing in so perfect an affection." Her charm never deserted her, and
she continued to the very last to receive the greatest men and women
of the day. Still the reigning beauty and the queen of French society,
she died at the age of seventy-two, o