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MADAME RÉCAMIER1

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

N the month of May last there vanished a figure unique

IN

among the women who have reigned by their beauty and by their grace; a salon was closed which for a long time had united, under a charming influence, the most illustrious and the most diverse personages, and in which even the most obscure had had at one time or another their chance of appearing. The first in renown in this group of memorable names were stricken by death almost at the same time with her who had been their principal attraction and bond. A few only survive, dispersed to-day and unconsoled; and those who have done no more than pass through this elect society have the right, and almost the duty, to talk about it, as of a thing which is henceforth of interest to all and which has become a portion of history.

The salon of Madame Récamier was much else besides, but it was also, especially in the last years, a center and home of letters. This type of social organ, which has been so active in France and which has exercised so real a dominion (this very salon of Madame Récamier is proof of it), does not go back farther than the seventeenth century. It is in the celebrated Hôtel de Rambouillet that we are agreed to place the establishment of polite society, of the society where people gathered together for the purpose of talking among themselves of beautiful things and particularly of the things of the mind. But the solemnity of this Rambouillet circle accords little with the idea which I should now like to evoke, and I shall do

1 The essay is dated Monday, November 26, 1849. The translation, by Frederick A. Manchester, is indebted in a number of details to the translations of E. J. Trechmann and Elizabeth Lee.

better to seek in places more modest and more reserved the true antecedents of the type of salon whose last representative we have just seen disappear. Toward the middle of the seventeenth century, at the end of the Faubourg St.-Jacques, just outside the Port Royal monastery, a lady went into retirement who had been famous for her intellectual talents and for the long splendor of her triumphs-the Marquise de Sablé. In this semi-retreat, with its window opening on the convent and its door still ajar toward the world, this old friend of M. de La Rochefoucauld, still active in mind, still taking an interest in everything, continued to gather about her, until the year 1678, when she died, the most distinguished and the most varied persons, old friends who had remained faithful and who came a long way to see her, from the city or the court; recluses, in a not too strict sense of the word, who, like herself, had been of the great world, and whose mind retirement had served only to sharpen and adorn; recluses by profession, whom, now and again, by her gracious importunity, she wrested from their vow of silence. These recluses, when they happened to be Arnauld or Nicole, could hardly, indeed, have been without worldly charm, and Pascal, once or twice, must have been of their number. This little salon of Madame de Sablé, so hidden, so much visited, and which, under the shadow of the cloister yet not too much feeling its influence, combined something of the advantages of both worlds, appears to me to be the earliest model of the salon which we have seen in our own day at the Abbaye-aux-Bois. It is only of this last that I have here to speak.

M. de Châteaubriand reigned there, and when he was present everything began or ended in him; but he was not always there, and even when he was, there were places and appropriate attentions and asides for each. Everything was talked of, but in confidence, as it were, and in tones a little more subdued than elsewhere. Everybody, or at least a great

many, frequented this salon, and yet there was about it nothing of the commonplace; you breathed there, from the moment you entered, an air of discretion and of mystery, Graciousness, but a graciousness at once sincere and discriminating, something personal-I know not what put you immediately at your ease, and tempered the first effect of initiation into what had ever so little the character of a sanctuary. Distinction was there, and familiarity, or at least naturalness, a great ease in the choice of subjects (of much importance to the play of conversation), a prompt way of entering into what you were saying, which was not merely politeness and good-will, but which testified to a more genuine interest. From the first the eye was met with a smile which said clearly, "I understand," and which irradiated everything with a gentle light, You did not go away, even for the first time, without having been touched in some private region of mind and heart, and you felt flattered and above all grateful. There were many distinguished salons in the eighteenth century, those of Madame Geoffrin, of Madame d'Houdetot, of Madame $uard. Madame Récamier knew them all and could describe them very well; anyone who wished to write of them with taste would have done well first to talk them over with her. But none of them could have resembled her own.

That was because she herself resembled no one. M. de Châteaubriand was the pride of her salon, but she was its soul, and it is she whom we must try to show to those who never knew her; for to recall her to those who have known her is superfluous, to paint her for them impossible. I shall take care here not to attempt her biography; biography women should never have wretched word fit only for men and unpleasantly reminiscent of study and research. Even when they have nothing of moment to conceal, women cannot but lose charm in the text of an extended narration. Can, indeed, the life of a woman be told? It is felt it passes-it ap

pears. I should wish even to set down no date whatever, for dates in such a subject are scarcely in taste. However, since there is no help, let us note merely that Jeanne-Françoise-JulieAdélaïde Bernard was born at Lyons, the birthplace of Louise Labé, December 3, 1777.1 Of all the baptismal names that I have just enumerated, the only one by which she was ordinarily known was Julie, altered to Juliette-although there was never to be a Romeo. She was married at Paris in her sixteenth year (April 24, 1793) to Jacques-Rose Récamier, a banker, already rich or soon to become so. At the beginning of the Consulate,2 we find her shining in society, fêted, applauded, the youngest queen of the world of elegance, giving the tone to fashion, with art creating simple things fit only for beings of the highest beauty. We who were not there can speak only with an extreme reserve of this epoch, mythological, as it were, of Madame Récamier, in which, from afar, she seems a goddess upon the clouds; we cannot speak of it as would be fitting-not indeed that there is anything to conceal, but because such beauty, youthful and tender, was possessed of subtle graces that cannot be described, at least not by one who has not seen them for himself. Who that had seen only the sunset would think to paint the dawn? Nevertheless, since one cannot well understand the character and the gracious genius of Madame Récamier, that ambition of the heart which in her showed so much strength and persistence underneath the delicacy; since one cannot well grasp her spirit and her total personality in the absence of a very definite notion as to what inspired her during this period-not so different, in fact, from what inspired her to the end-I shall touch rapidly some of the authentic elements in the legend which for her, as for all beings that wield enchantment, already hides the truth. When we wish to judge Madame de Sévigné or

1 Louise Labé was a French poetess of the sixteenth century. translation of one of her sonnets, see Poetry, P. 511.

2 That is, towards the end of 1799.

For a

Madame de Maintenon, and interpret to ourselves their natures, we must of necessity have a general idea and a theory regarding them. To understand well, for example, what Madame de Maintenon was in relation to Louis XIV, or Madame de Sévigné in relation to her daughter, and what kind of sentiment or passion they brought to their object, one must first have asked oneself several questions concerning the youth of these two women, or more simply one must have asked oneself one question, always the first and almost the only one that needs to be asked in speaking of a woman: Was she ever in love? and in what manner did she love?

I shall then ask the question, or rather, in the case of Madame Récamier, the question arises of itself; and for her as for Madame de Maintenon, and for Madame de Sévigné (Madame de Sévigné not yet a mother), I answer boldly, No. No, she never loved, never loved with passion and with fire; but the immense need of loving which is felt by every tender soul was changed with her into an infinite need of pleasing, or, better, of being loved, and into an active determination and a fervent desire to pay in kindness for all that she received. We who have seen her in her last years, and upon whom as we passed have fallen the rays of this divine goodness, well do we know whether she was able to pay that debt, and whether indeed friendship did not find out in her that flame which love had never found.

Two epochs, very distinct, are to be noted in the life of Madame Récamier: her time of youth, of triumph and of beauty, the long bright morning that lasted till the sunset; and afterward the evening when the sun had gone-her old age I can never name it. In these two epochs, so diversely colored, she was at bottom the same, but she no doubt appeared to be very different. She was the same in two essential particulars, which alone explain her nature: the one that in her youth, when her life was gayest, she remained ever pure;