Chapitre XIX

Madame Recamier-Her salon and her admirers-Ampere, Ballanche, and Mathieu de Montmorency-Montmorency jealous of Chateaubriand-Madame de Duras jealous of Madame Récamier-She writes Chateaubriand letters of complaint, warning, and remonstrance-Chateaubriand's devotion to Madame Récamier-Its limitations-" A little interlude of jealousy.

WHEN, where, and in what circumstances Chateaubriand and Madame Récamier first met cannot be ascertained. He wrote several versions of the story for his Mémoires; but when he read them to her, she always insisted on his altering them. It may be true, as he once wrote, that he discovered her languishing on a sofa in Madame de Staël's drawing-room and wondered " whether it was the image of Modesty or of Love that I beheld." It is not the less likely to be true because the statement is one of those which Madame Récamier suppressed; but one does not search confidently for the truth in doctored documents, and, as the matter is of no great importance, we may leave the mystery unsolved.

Their friendship began, at any rate, in or about 1818, when Chateaubriand was fifty and Madame Récamier was forty-three, but looked no more than thirty; and they encountered as two celebrities equally famous for their " successes" in the field of love. Each of them had, so to say, a " list" on which it seemed

R 24T essential to self-respect and in accordance with the fitness of things that the name of the other should be inscribed. So incense was burnt to Chateaubriand in Madame Récamier's apartment in the Abbaye-aux-Bois; and Chateaubriand, whom the fragrance of incense always pleased, acquired the habit of assiduity. Every morning he sent Juliette a letter; and every afternoon at three o'clock he came to call, " with his waist squeezed in," writes Philarète Chasles, "his cane in his hand, his head in the air, and his fingers buried in his waistcoat."

This was the period at which Benjamin Constant, having loved Madame Récamier in vain-and yet not more vainly than a good many of the others-had succeeded in curing himself of his unprofitable passion, and gone away vowing that he would do his best to " make Charlotte¹ happy"; but his departure had by no means left Madame Récamier without admirers sighing at her feet. There were at least three other supplicants for her favour at the time, though only one of them counted.

1 His wife. ↩

J.-J. Ampère² did not count, for he was only a boy of one-and-twenty; and though Madame Récamier encouraged him as she encouraged all her tributaries, he dared not presume very much and was easily kept in his place. Similarly with "the worthy Ballanche," whom we have met before. He had given up his business in Lyons in order to live in Paris and be near Madame Récamier; but she only made him useful, employing him to run errands, to write letters, and to open the door to her visitors when her footman was out. The one suitor who did count was Mathieu de Montmorency, the Minister for Foreign Affairs; and him Chateaubriand supplanted, by degrees if not at once.

2 Ampère in 1833 was made Professor of French Literature at the College de France, and in 1848 was elected to the Academy. ↩

Mathieu de Montmorency belonged to one of the oldest families in France. He was an ultra, both in politics and in religion, and inclined to mysticism. At Vienna, on his way to Verona, he broke an appointment with Metternich in order to call upon a nun; and it has been written of him that "he flattered himself that he was religious whereas in truth he was only devout." His piety, at any rate, was not so extreme as to prevent him from making love to married women, though his intimates called him " Saint Matthew." He bought Chateaubriand's house at La Vallée-aux-Loups, as has already been mentioned, and Madame Récamier stayed there alone with him-an adventure which brought her a delightful letter from the Duchesse de Broglie¹.' " You must confess," Madame de Broglie wrote, "that when the time comes for including Mathieu's biography in the Lives of the Saints, this tête-à-tete with the most beautiful and widely admired woman of his age will furnish material for a very amusing chapter »

1 Albertine de Staël. R 2 243 ↩

No doubt it would, if the particulars were ascertainable; but they are not. All that we really know is that, at first, Chateaubriand was jealous of Mathieu de Montmorency, and that, afterwards, Mathieu de Montmorency was jealous of Chateaubriand ; and this jealousy explains a good deal. It explains-or at all events it is a partial explanation of-the ease with which Chateaubriand obtained important diplomatic appointments, and the reluctance with which he accepted them. All Mathieu's influence was at his disposal for this purpose, for Mathieu wanted him out of the way. He, on his part, regarded himself as " in exile" alike in Berlin and in London because he wanted to sit in Madame Récamier's salon, and knew that Mathieu had the field practically to himself during his absence. The pains of exile might be mitigated by the devotion of the Duchess of Cumberland in one capital and the coquetries of Mrs. Sutton in the other; but Paris remained the centre of his sentimental interests.

Mathieu de Montmorency's jealousy, however, was not the only jealousy which the new relation had involved. Madame de Duras was jealous too. Her intimacy with Chateaubriand, it is true, was only " Platonic," and she had no proof that her rival's intimacy with him was of any more ardent character; but that fact made little, if any, difference to her feelings. She was plain, and she knew it and deplored it; and the plain are always ready to be jealous of the beautiful. She saw Chateaubriand ceasing to call daily on her in order that he might call daily on Madame Récamier; she felt herself neglected, and was hurt. She continued to work for him and push his fortunes in the political coulisses with a loyalty that never relaxed, and he, on his part, continued to lean with his full weight upon her influence; but the tone of their letters changed by imperceptible degrees. We find Madame de Duras complaining, and Chateaubriand resenting her complaints, and even going so far, on more than one occasion, as to threaten to " close this correspondence."

The correspondence was long, and it would be possible to fill a good many pages with extracts which would do honour to Madame de Duras' heart. She was faithful to Chateaubriand through good report and evil, in spite of deceptions and exposures, and in spite of contumely and neglect. No woman, it may fairly be said, ever did more to help a politician on his way, or got less thanks for helping him. She spoke for him in the Cabinet, as we have seen, and she gave him good advice which it was always profitable to him to take. Her services were so valuable that he could not afford to drive her away, but had always to be thanking her for something; and yet, when we come to read her letters, we find a refrain of lamentation running through them.

Already, when he is at Berlin, we find her protesting that he does not write often enough: " I have been kept waiting for your letters, and have been upset, and have hardly the heart to write to you"; and then, a little later, laying her finger on the cause of her trouble, she says—

"If you only did me an injustice for the sake of the mistress whose name I can guess, I would say, Well and good. All honour to your fidelity! But they tell me that your real mistress is the lady of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, and that that is the address at which your letters are delivered. Ah, my dear brother, this is very young conduct for an old diplomatist. Will the turn of friendship never come? And do you really think that any one else looks after your interests better than I do?"

"How can you believe all this nonsense about the Abbaye-aux-Bois?" was Chateaubriand's answer to that; but Madame de Duras knew very well that what she had heard was not nonsense and had very good reasons for believing it. Yet she forgave, and when Chateaubriand was leaving for London, wrote-

" Do you know what friendship means? Do you know what it is to spend a long morning without seeing the friend to whom you are accustomed to open your heart and talk about all the little miseries of which life is made up? I have had all my clocks stopped in order that I may no longer hear the striking of the hours at which you will not come »

And then, on the anniversary of the execution of Chateaubriand's cousin Armand, she visited the grave at Grenelle on his behalf, and picked a primrose there, and sent it to him. "I picked just such another » she wrote, "the very first time I went there with you. That was fourteen years ago, and I have it still « And then, in another letter-

" Yesterday I went out for a walk, and it suddenly flashed upon me that I had to be back at one o'clock. Then I remembered that it was to see you that I wanted to return. I cannot tell you how sad the thought was and how melancholy it made me all day long."

There follow letters of warning and remonstrance on Chateaubriand's besetting vice of extravagance-

"I recommend to your attention the virtue of economy. Do not imitate the cobler in the play and imagine that you possess all the money that God has made because you happen to have f20,00o. You will soon come to an end of it at that rate. So behave like a man of character, and never get behindhand with your bills. You will say I am tyrannical. So I am in these matters, for I know it wouldn't take you long to run up debts to the tune of £6,000-that is to say 150,000 of our poor francs. Remember how embarrassed you used to be, and for how long ! »

She had earned the right to lecture him like that by helping him, though she sometimes vowed that she had liked him better in the old days when his blue coat was threadbare and his boots were down at heel. She playfully reminded him of those days in a letter in which she asked him to make her a present of Horace Walpole's Memoirs: "In the days when we were neither of us very well off, I lent you a little money. Now that you are richer than I am, I beg you to make me a present of this book." And so forth; the correspondence ranging over a wide field of subjects, but with two refrains continually recurring in it. Chateaubriand's refrain, petulantly repeated as often as he is provoked, is: "I shall give up writing to you." Madame de Duras' refrain is that Chateaubriand is ungrateful and unkind, and that it cuts her to the heart to be forsaken for the hostess of the Abbaye-aux-Bois—

"You possess a thousand good qualities; but you are a man, and affectations and mincing ways are sure to have more effect on you than has the simple, sincere, and solid attachment of my heart."

And again more bitterly-

"No, my dear brother, no one can deprive you of my friendship. Such a friendship is like a noble attribute of the soul. No one but yourself can take it away from you. When I realize my own sincerity and devotion to you, and remember that, for fifteen years, I have thought more of you than of myself, and have, over and over again, set your interests before my own-and that quite naturally and without any consciousness of superior merit-and when I perceive that you will not make even the slightest sacrifice for me, I am indignant with myself for my folly.... Such a friendship as mine does not consent to be divided, but has all the drawbacks of love; and, though I know that it has none of the advantages of love, we have both passed the age at which that really matters. The knowledge that you talk to others just as you talk to me, and associate them with your feelings and your affairs, is intolerable to me, and always will be. Enough, therefore, of such thoughts. They hurt me; and I do not want that bitterness to be added to the pain which your absence causes me »

Let that suffice. We need no further proofs. All the love and all the loyalty of Madame de Duras stands revealed in these extracts from her letters. She had no illusions. No other woman ever read Chateaubriand's heart as clearly as she read it. No other woman had so much to forgive, or forgave it so completely; there was no other woman to whom he owed more or accorded less. She bore his rebuffs, and made light of them, and continued to love him, and to work and intrigue for him, making, as it were, a career of the promotion of his interests, until the day when his dramatic expulsion from the Cabinet made it impossible for her to serve him any longer. Then having lived only for him for fifteen years, she dropped out of his life, and went to Nice, and died; while he, on his part, went on his way untroubled, resolved to lay his life, as he puts it, "like a carpet of flowers," at Madame Récamier's feet.

" As I approach my end," he writes in the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe, "I feel that everything that has been dear to me has been so in relation to Madame Récamier, and that she has been the secret source of all my affections. My recollections of every period of my life-my dreams as well as my experiences-have become confused and commingled into a composite idea of charms and tender pains of which she is the visible form. She is the ruler of my sentiments and the supreme authority of heaven has introduced happiness, order and peace into my round of duties."

It is a faithful picture if we isolate it, and regard it merely as a picture of the later days. Whatever there was of serene dignity, of continuity and finality, in Chateaubriand's sentimental life is to be found concentrated in this last friendship or liaison-for one hesitates as to the word-of thirty years' duration. He and Madame Récamier, after many and various experiments with life, many false starts, and many regrettable mistakes, were at last to solve its hardest problem, and grow old together with increasing dignity in mutual confidence and undisturbed affection.

But not yet-and not for a good many years to come. Chateaubriand could not think of beginning to grow old at fifty, and could not easily bring himself to confess that he had grown old at sixty; and the common legend that, after he had once met Madame Récamier, his life belonged to her, and hers to him, is by no means in accordance with the facts. Juliette at forty-three-and for some time after she was forty-three -was still a coquette unwilling to allow any one admirer undisputed pre-eminence in her heart. It may be that, from the first-or almost from the first-she preferred Chateaubriand to Mathieu de Montmorency; but it was a long time before she altogether ceased to play the two men off against each other. If Mathieu was jealous, Chateaubriand was jealous too; and it is very doubtful whether his jealousy entirely disappeared before the day when Mathieu died suddenly while at his devotions in the church of Saint Thomas-Aquinas on Good Friday, 1826. And meanwhile he had himself given very good grounds for jealousy.

"There was at that time (in 1823)," writes Sainte-Beuve, " a little interlude of jealousy on account of a certain very pretty and clever woman, a Madame de C— -, who was the recipient of a great deal of attention at the Foreign Office."

He says no more, and he only drops his mysterious hint in a footnote; but no doubt he knew a good deal more than he said. At any rate the clue which he furnishes has been followed up by an anonymous writer in Les Annales Romantiques. Letters have been discovered. Madame de C- has been identified; and the story-or a great deal of it-can be reconstructed.