Part 8 (1/2)

The life of Madame Recamier is interesting, in a pre-eminent degree, on account of the warmth, elevation, and fidelity of the friends.h.i.+ps which filled it. Her personal loveliness and social charm made her a universal favorite, and gave her an unparalleled celebrity. But, full as her career was of romantic adventures, rich as it was in brilliant a.s.sociations, its keynote throughout, its strongest interest at every point, is friends.h.i.+p. Unlike those of so many of the famous women of France, her friends.h.i.+ps were as remarkable for their rational soundness, purity, and tenacity, as for their fervor. They were free from every thing morbid or affected. An adverse fate forbade the love to which she seemed destined by her bewitching beauty and grace; and a certain divine chill in the blood, a stamp from Diana in the senses, turned all the warmth of affection upwards into the mind, to radiate thence in her face and manners, and to make her a high priestess of friends.h.i.+p. The pure and wise Ballanche, who idolized her, said that she was originally an Antigone, of whom people vainly wished by force to make an Armada.

Her nominal husband is supposed by some to have been in reality her father; the marriage being merely a t.i.tular one, to secure his fortune to her in case of his death by the guillotine, of which he was then in daily dread. Deprived of the usual domestic vents of affection, her rich heart naturally led her to crave the best subst.i.tute, friends.h.i.+p. And her matchless personal gifts, together with her truly charming traits of character, enabled her permanently to win and experience this in a very exalted degree. Her three princ.i.p.al friends were Montmorency, Ballanche, and Chateaubriand; all three original and extraordinary characters, and all three worthy in spite of some drawbacks on the part of the last of the extraordinary devotion she gave them. The letters of these three possess extreme interest. Especially, those of the first named are the unique monument of an affection whose purity and delicacy equalled its vivacity and depth.

Matthieu de Montmorency was one of the n.o.blest of the n.o.bility of France, alike in birth and in spirit. In his youth a voluptuous liver, he had afterwards undergone a genuine and solemn conversion.

While in Switzerland, the news of the guillotining of his brother gave him such a shock, that it revolutionized his motives and his life. The gay, impa.s.sioned, fascinating man of the world became an austere and fervent Christian. The rich sensibility he had formerly spent in amours and display, henceforward enn.o.bled by wisdom and sanctified by religion, lent a singular charm of tenderness and loftiness to his friends.h.i.+ps. The memory of his own errors gave a gracious charitableness to his judgments; his sorrow imparted an incomparable refinement to his air; his grave and devout demeanor inspired veneration; his sweet magnanimity drew every unprejudiced heart. He had long been a fervent friend of Madame de Staid, when the youthful virgin-wife, the dazzling Julie Recamier, formed an engrossing attachment to that gifted woman. Drawn mutually to this common goal, the fore-ordained friends soon met. He was then fifty years old; she, twenty-three. Her extraordinary charms of person and spirit, her dangers, exposed, with such, bewildering beauty and such peculiar domestic relations, to all the seductions of a most corrupt society, awakened at once his admiration, his sympathy, and his pity.

As an increasing intimacy revealed her irresistible sweetness of disposition, her many gifts and virtues, Montmorency found himself ever more and more drawn to her by the united bonds of reason, conscience, and affection. He undertook not merely to be her friend in the ordinary pleasures of sympathy, but, as a Christian, under the eye of G.o.d, sincerely and profoundly to befriend her. From that moment until his death, his devotion, though once severely tried, never faltered nor slumbered. He was to her more than a father and a brother; he was her guardian angel, as pure in feeling, as watchful to warn, to restrain, to encourage, to support, and console. For many years, through trying reverses of fortune, he visited her every evening. For many years each had a vital share in all that concerned the other; and, when he died, it was as if a large part of her being had been suddenly torn out of her soul, and transferred to heaven.

The letters that pa.s.sed between them form one of the most delightful and impressive records ever made of Christian friends.h.i.+p, a record in which wisdom and duty are as prominent as affection.

Pierre Simon Ballanche, one of the most delicate and philosophical of French authors, most disinterested and affectionate of men, the perfect model of a friend, was born at Lyons in 1776. He was first introduced to Madame Recamier, in 1812, by their common friend, the generous and eloquent Camille Jordan. Ballanche, in an enthusiastic attachment to a n.o.ble, portionless young girl, had suffered a disappointment so deep, that it caused him to dismiss all thoughts of marriage for ever. He sought to ease the burden of rejected love, by letting the sadness it had engendered exhale in a literary work. This exquisite work, called ”Fragments,” Jordan induced Madame Recamier to read: he also described to her the refined and magnanimous character of the author. Thus prepared, and aided by her own keen discernment, she immediately detected his choice talents, his rare vein of sentiment, his abiding hunger for affection. Ballanche was a philosopher of solitude, a poet and priest of humanity, spending his days far from the crowd and uproar of the world, his proper haunt the summits of the loftiest minds, the mysterious cradle of the destinies of society. His soul was an ”AEolian harp,” through which the music of the pre-historic ages played. Chast.i.ty and sorrow were two geniuses, who unveiled to him the destiny of man. His philosophy, so redolent of the heart and the imagination, amidst the material struggles and selfishness of the time, has been compared to a chant of Orpheus in the school of Hobbes. The friends.h.i.+p which Madame Recamier gave this lonesome, sad, expansive, and lofty spirit, was as if a G.o.ddess had come down from heaven on purpose to minister to him. She brought him the attention he needed, the sympathy he pined for, the position and praise which were so grateful to his sensitive nature. She strove to win for him from others the recognition he deserved, to call out his powers, and to show off his gift to the best advantage. Ballanche was timid, awkward, ugly, with no wealth, with no rank; but, in the sight of Madame Recamier, the treasures and graces of his soul were an intrinsic recommendation far superior to these outward advantages, and she was ready to honor it to the full.

Never was kindness more worthily bestowed; never was it more gratefully received. ”I often,” he says, ”find myself astonished at your goodness to me. The silent, weary, sad man, whom others neglect, you notice, and seek with infinite tact to draw him out. You are indulgence and pity personified, and you compa.s.sionately see in me a kind of exile. Together with the feeling of a brother for a sister, I offer you the homage of my soul.” From that time, he belonged to her, and could not bear to live separate from her. Under her appreciation and encouragement, he expanded, like a plant moved from a chill shade into the suns.h.i.+ne. His devotion was entire, and sought no equal return. It was simply the natural expression of his grat.i.tude to her, his admiration of her, his delight in seeing her and in being with her. His love for her, like that of Dante for Beatrice, was a religious wors.h.i.+p, a celestial exhalation of his soul, utterly free from every alloy of earth and sense. For thirty-four years, he was almost inseparable from her. He removed to Paris, that he might look on her every day. Wherever she travelled, abroad or at home, he was one of her companions. At her receptions of company, the fame of which has gone through the world, he was invariably an honored and active a.s.sistant. And, despite his deformed face, and uncouth appearance and bearing, he was a great favorite with all the chosen guests at the Abbaye-aux-Bois. To those who really knew him, his large, beaming eyes and n.o.ble forehead, his disinterested goodness, his literary and philosophical accomplishments, his modest unworldliness and attentive sympathy, redeemed his physical blemishes, and covered them with a radiance superior to that of mere beauty. The letters of Ballanche to Madame Recamier are charming in their originality. His praise of her is marked by an inimitable grace of sincerity and refinement:

”Your presence, so full of magic, the sweet reflection of your soul, will be to me a powerful inspiration. You are a perfect poem; you are poesy itself. It is your destiny to inspire, mine to be inspired. An occupation would do you good; your disturbed and dreamy imagination has need of aliment. Take care of your health, spare your nerves: you are an angel who has gone a little astray in coming into a world of agitation and falsehood.”

What a reading of her inmost heart through her envied position, what matchless felicity of representation, in this picture of herself sent to her in one of his letters ”The phoenix, marvellous but solitary bird, is said often to weary of himself. He feeds on perfumes, and lives in the purest region of the air; and his brilliant existence ends on a pyre of odoriferous woods, kindled by the sun. More than once, without doubt, he envies the lot of the white dove, because she has a companion like herself.”

In his high estimate of her talent, he tried to persuade her to undertake a literary work, the translation and ill.u.s.tration of Petrarch, which she actually began, but left unfinished.

”Your province, like my own,” he writes, ”is the interior of the sentiments; but, believe me, you have at command the genius of music, of flowers, of brooding meditation, and of elegance. Privileged creature, a.s.sume a little confidence, lift your charming head, and fear not to try your hand on the golden lyre of the poets. It is my mission to see that some trace of your n.o.ble existence remains on this earth. Help me to fulfil my mission. I regard it as a blessing that you will be loved and appreciated when you are no more. It would be a real misfortune if so excellent a being should pa.s.s merely as a charming shadow. Of what use is memory, if it does not perpetuate the beautiful and good?”

This league of lofty friends.h.i.+p, of endearing intercourse and service, held good while a whole generation of mortals came upon the stage and disappeared; and it throve with growing validity in the latest old age of the fortunate parties. Ballanche believed, after the death of his mother, that he saw her, several successive mornings, enter his room, and ask him how he had pa.s.sed the night.

This ocular illusion affords us an affecting glimpse of his heart. He wrote to his friend, ”Antiquity confides its weariness and grief to us, without doubt, to beguile us from our own.” ”Had Orpheus never met Eurydice, his existence would have remained incomplete; and, in place of the cruel grief of her loss, he would have known another grief not less intense, solitude of soul.” ”I am alone, and the solitude weighs heavily upon me. Permit me to solace myself by talking a moment with you.” ”I protest to you in all sincerity, that my one absorbing thought is my warm feeling of friends.h.i.+p for you. I have need to be a.s.sured by you, and that as often as possible, that this sentiment shall not end in unhappiness for me. The thought of that is an agony which terrifies me. You are so kind, you have so much sympathy for all unhappy persons, that I fear it is through pity and condescension that you show kindness to me.” This expression was in the year 1816; but all such uneasiness soon vanished, and he learned to rely on her sincere cordiality with a serene a.s.surance, which was the richest luxury of his life.

In 1830, Ballanche, publis.h.i.+ng his chief work, the ”Palingenesie Sociale,” dedicated it to Madame Recamier, in a form whose delicacy and fervor made it one of the most exquisite pieces of praise ever paid in letters. Alluding to Canova's portrait of Madame Recamier, in the character of the celestial guide of Dante, he says, ”An artist enveloped in a grand renown, a sculptor who has just shed so much glory on the ill.u.s.trious land of Dante, and whose graceful imagination the masterpieces of antiquity have so often exalted, one day, for the first time, saw a woman who seemed to him a living apparition of Beatrice. Full of that religious emotion which is the gift of genius, he immediately commanded the marble, always obedient to his chisel, to express the sudden inspiration of the moment; and the Beatrice of Dante pa.s.sed from the vague region of poetry into the domain of substantial art. The sentiment which dwells in this harmonious countenance, now become a new type of pure and virgin beauty, in its turn inspires artists and poets. This woman, whose name I would here conceal, whom I would veil even as Dante does, is endowed with all the generous sympathies of our age. She has visited, with the select few, the haunts of lofty minds. Here, in this seat of imperturbable peace, of unalterable security, she has formed n.o.ble friends.h.i.+ps, those friends.h.i.+ps which have filled her life, which, born under immortal auspices, are sheltered alike from time, from death, and from all human vicissitudes. I address myself, then, to her who has been seen as a living apparition of Beatrice. Can she encourage me with her smile, with that serious smile of love and of grace, which expresses at once confidence and pity for the pains of probation, for the burdens of an exile that should end, sweet and calm augury, wherein is revealed, even in the present, the certainty of our infinite hopes, the grandeur of our definitive destinies?”

When the good Ballanche was taken dangerously ill, Madame Recamier had just undergone an operation for cataract, and was under strict orders from the physician not to leave her couch. But, on the announcement of the condition of Ballanche, she immediately rose, and went to his bedside, and watched by him until his last breath. In the anxiety and tears of this experience, she lost all hope of recovering her sight. Her incomparable friend received the supreme hospitality at her hands, and was buried in her family tomb, leaving, in his works, a delightful picture of his mind; in his life, a perfect model of devotion. The removal of this soul, echo of her own; this heart, wholly filled by her; this mind, so gladly submissive to her influence, could not but leave a mighty void behind. For, notwithstanding the wondrous array of gifts, attractions, and attentions lavished on her, her deep sensibility and interior loneliness made her often unhappy. She would sit by herself, in the twilight, playing from memory choice pieces of the great masters of music, the tears rolling down her cheeks. Friends.h.i.+p was more than a delight: it was a necessity to her.

De Tocqueville p.r.o.nounced an exquisite eulogy by the grave of Ballanche, in the name of the Academy. La Prade, in the funeral address he delivered at Lyons, the birthplace of the deceased, said, ”There was in his mind, in its serenity, its charming simplicity, its tenderness, something more than is found in the wisest and the best.

His virtue was of a divine nature: it was at once a prolonged innocence and an acquired wisdom. Serene and radiant as his soul may now be in the mansions of peace, we can hardly conceive of it as more loving and more pure than we beheld it on this earth of infirmity and of strife.” What a delight it is to contemplate the relation that bound two such spirits together, the measureless treasures of inspiration, solace, joy, it must have yielded to them both I Sarah Austin, who was in Paris at the time Ballanche died, and an intimate of the ill.u.s.trious circle of friends, says, ”I shall never forget the sort of consternation, mingled with sorrow, which this death caused.

Everybody felt regret for so pure and excellent a man, but yet more of grief and pity for Madame Recamier, whose loss was felt to be overwhelming, and entirely irreparable.” Ampere says, in his cordial and glowing memoir of Ballanche, ”While he was composing his 'Antigone,' Poetry appeared to him under an enchanting form. He became acquainted with her, 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 a.s.sured Madame Recamier, 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 ere did martyrdom of heart confer, Two shadowy forms of Truth and Friends.h.i.+p rise, To seek their home together in the skies.

Pervading and earnest, however, as were these attachments of Madame Recamier to Montmorency and Ballanche, the crowning pa.s.sion of her life was her friends.h.i.+p for Chateaubriand. This grand writer and imposing person has described his first meeting with her:

”I was one morning with Madame de Stael, who, at toilet in the hands of her maid, twirled a green twig in her fingers while she talked.

Suddenly Madame Recamier entered, clothed in white. She sits down on a blue-silk sofa. Madame de Stael, standing, continues her eloquent conversation. I scarcely reply, my eyes riveted on Madame Recamier. 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 lavis.h.i.+ng 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 Stael, 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 Recamier as her enthusiasm for brilliant minds, n.o.ble sentiment and conduct. It was this that had so fascinated her with Madame de Stael. 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 pa.s.sionately. It was inevitable 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 Stael'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 pa.s.sion was not friends.h.i.+p, 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 friends.h.i.+p, and by the triumphs of your reason. I am, for friends.h.i.+p'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 friends.h.i.+p of Madame Recamier 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 n.o.ble, 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 Recamier'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. In a poem which he addressed to her, he called her the ”soft star that guided his path.”

Such jealousy as can find a place in natures so n.o.ble 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 Recamier'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 amba.s.sador 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 pa.s.s my time here in Notre Dame. It is well occupied; for I think only of you and of G.o.d.” The persistence of an affection so profound and so pure as that of Madame Recamier bore its proper fruit, and ended by subduing Chateaubriand. Grat.i.tude, 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 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 fort.i.tude 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 n.o.ble beauty, brilliancy, and genius bending beneath the weight of age, and sheltered, with such ingenious tenderness, by the sacred friends.h.i.+p of a woman who forgot her own infirmities, in the endeavor to lighten his.”