sake, and I long to go and enjoy the sweet privilege once more. Forgive me this morning's letter; but own it was very natural. Adieu: persist in your high resolve, and ask for help from Him who alone can both fortify and recompense."

M. de Chateaubriand about this time was obliged to sell the house he had built near Aulney; the grounds, called the Valléeaux-Loups, containing the cedar he had brought from the Holy Land, and other trees planted by his own hands. Madame Récamier and Mathieu de Montmorency hoped to buy it between them. This cherished project was necessarily abandoned on account of a second failure of M. Récamier, which took place in 1819. Madame Récamier, in hopes of saving him, had given up 4000l., one-fourth of the property her mother had left to her. To avoid the pain of declaring to all the family that dispersion was absolutely necessary, she made up her mind to break up her establishment, to sell the hotel she had lately bought and the furniture, and retire to the Abbaye-au-Bois, where a friend of hers had lived for several years, from whom she learnt the advantages to be derived from it. The first and most necessary was economy. No men were allowed to live even in the exterior of the convent. Her husband, M. Bernard, and old M. Simonard, who was always one of the family, could live in a small lodging close at hand; they could dine with her every day, and spend the evenings with her. By this means all the expenses of hospitality, to which they had all been accustomed, became impossible. Retiring to a convent was retiring from the world. It also enabled her to live alone without the appearance of disagreement with M. Récamier. Being afraid of his speculating habits, she required a promise that he would entirely give up all money transactions. He was sixty-nine, and had failed twice; she saw nothing but misery if he began again; she had conformed as much as she could at all times, considering her exile and strange position, to the exigencies of public opinion; and, considering this position and her beauty and successes, the world had been very just to her. This is the more remarkable, because, though very scrupulous both in appearance and reality about herself, her early intimacies with the ladies of the Bonaparte family, and many others not more scrupulous, would have injured her reputation, had not her standard of morality been widely and visibly different from that of her associates.

We must now see her in a small apartment with a brick floor on the third story in the Abbaye-au-Bois, a large old building in the Rue de Sèvres, with a courtyard closed on the street by a high iron gate surmounted by a cross of the same metal. Through this iron gate you see the court, and at the end the entrance to

the chapel. Various staircases descend into this yard, conducting to apartments inhabited by retired ladies. This was called the exterior of the convent. She only inhabited the third floor for a year or two, and then removed to a better apartment on the first floor, with the same staircase, whose windows opened also on the convent garden, where she remained till 1838. But we return to her first entrance into the convent. On the first day, when dinner assembled the little colony in the very small and crooked apartment, Madame Récamier did not find it easy to raise the spirits of the party; but in a few days all the world found out the way to this out-of-the-way place; and the visitors included some of the most eminent for rank and talent. She would say many years afterwards, that when she lived in her crooked brick-floored apartment on the third story she felt more certain that she was sought for her own sake, and took more pleasure in it, than in her grand house in the Rue du Mont Blanc. Her cell, as M. de Chateaubriand called it, was soon as cheerful as all places became when she inhabited them. Hither every night came Mathieu de Montmorency,-always late, because his duties as chevalier d'honneur to the Duchesse d'Angoulême required his attendance till she retired to rest; so that the iron gate of the convent, which had always been closed at eleven, was now permitted to remain open till twelve. Until his death these evening visits never ceased.

From the very beginning of M. de Chateaubriand's daily visits to Madame Récamier he became the first object of her life. He was the most methodical man in the world. He wrote a letter to her every morning, and arrived at three o'clock precisely. He was not a shy man, but he disliked company; and she admitted no one at his hour without asking his leave. The circle enlarged by degrees; but at that time, whatever mixed company she saw came in the evening, when he was not there. All her habits were modified to suit his convenience. Madame Récamier had been till then the object round which others revolved. He was now the centre; and perhaps the self-forgetfulness now required of her elevated her character.

In consequence of the murder of the Duc de Berry, the ultra ministry came in. Mathieu de Montmorency, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, went to the Congress of Verona and its continuation at Vienna. And after much difficulty on the king's part, M. de Chateaubriand, then ambassador in London, was sent to join him at the Congress. M. de Chateaubriand's very numerous letters leave the impression that ambition at that time had complete possession of him, and that Madame Récamier was the devoted confidant of all his hopes and fears. On the 26th of December 1822, M. de Villèle, Minister of Finance, refusing to

fulfil what Mathieu de Montmorency had promised at the Congress, he sent in his resignation, as he did not think it strictly honourable not to keep to the very letter the fulfilment of his agreement with the European powers. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was then offered to M. de Chateaubriand, who had remained at Vienna, who was a favourite of Alexander, and who had appeared to M. de Villèle more disposed to agree with his measures. He writes to Madame Récamier: "I refused Villèle at twelve. The king sent for me at four. He kept me an hour and a half preaching to me; I resisting. At length he ordered me to obey. I obeyed. Thus I remain with you. But this ministry will kill me. Yours." We see no sign of death in what follows. He had ardently desired to declare war with Spain, and to conduct it. This ministry of M. de Chateaubriand was in his own eyes the culminating point of his life. His party proclaimed him the first statesman and writer of his time. His great literary reputation in the beginning of the century had given him a voracious appetite for praise, and he was not proof against the dizziness which seizes poor mortals in high positions.

Although Madame Récamier sympathised entirely with the joy and triumph of her illustrious friend, she could not but feel that his access to power had destroyed all the quiet of her existence; that her peaceful life was troubled by the agitation of his. Those former pleasant interviews every day at the same hour were prevented by cabinet councils, sittings of the Chamber, &c. And not merely his habits were altered; his temper and character had not withstood the intoxication of the world nor its flattery, and especially of that portion of the world to which he was most susceptible,-the fine ladies, who wished to charm the melancholy poet and great statesman as they were charmed. Chateaubriand ever protested that his pure and devoted affection never could cease to be hers; that Madame Récamier was and ever would be "the sweet star that guided his path," as he called her in a poem addressed to her long afterwards. But he did not follow this star undeviatingly, but was led out of the path by at least one Will-o'-the-wisp. Mathieu de Montmorency could not but feel that M. de Chateaubriand had now the place in the cabinet which from a delicate sense of honour he had given up; Chateaubriand had sided with Villèle against him; and once in the cabinet, had made Villèle follow the very measures to which M. de Montmorency had pledged himself at Verona, and thus got all the credit of them. His tenderness for Madame Récamier inspired the most delicate and constant vigilance in concealing how much he felt this conduct, in order that her position might be free from

pain between him and his victorious rival. Many years after wards she told a friend, that feeling a sentiment so perfect and which had filled her whole mind losing all its charm, dwindling into nothing, and feeling that she might not always be able to help reproaching Chateaubriand, so that even the happy past might be clouded and spoilt, and be replaced in her mind by the recollections of quarrels and reproaches,-feeling the danger of this, and resolving that it should not be, she determined to go abroad. She left for Italy in November 1823. The health of her adopted niece was the ostensible cause. M. Ballanche could not comprehend existence where she was not, and prepared to follow. He had a charming companion in the son of an old friend and compatriot, M. Ampère, then about twenty-two, who had been introduced by him at the Abbaye-au-Bois, and who became as devoted to Madame Récamier as any of the earliest friends of her youth. Perhaps nothing can prove her peculiar charm so well as the attachment of this young friend. It is true he had lost his mother when an infant, and he found with Madame Récamier that delightful sensation of rest which is as necessa to affectionate natures as the soft feathered nest is to the unfledged bird.

These

This departure for Italy was a terrible effort to Madame Récamier. If there could be any doubt as to the cause of her departure, and as to the correctness of the explanation which she gave of it five-and-twenty years afterwards, M. de Chateaubriand's letter would remove it. He writes thus: " No, you cannot have bid adieu to all the happiness this earth can give. If you go, you will soon return; and you will find me what I was and ever shall be. Do not accuse me of what you do yourself." In another letter he says: "You see you are mistaken; this journey is useless: if you go, you will soon return." were written before the day of her departure. She left Paris on the 2d of November. The next letter says: "Always fearing to hurt your feelings when you think so lightly of mine, I write these lines in time to reach you at Lyons. On Thursday I shall be in Paris, and you will be there no more. You would have it so. Shall you find me when you return? You don't care. To one who like you has had the heart to trample on every thing, what signifies the future? But I shall ever hope and wait; I never did cease to love you." In another, "Your resolution was so sudden that doubtless you supposed it would bring happiness to you. What should you care for letters ?" There are many more written in this querulous tone. They continue about five months. Madame Lenormant supposes the others may be lost; but we happen to know that Madame Récamier told a friend that he had been a year without writing to her.

Madame Récamier never ceased thinking of M. de Chateaubriand, and when, on the 6th of June, he was dismissed by Louis XVIII. in the most abrupt manner, she entreats her friends to write all the particulars. The reason was his disagreement with Villèle, who proposed lowering the five per cent. government stock to four, a measure which M. de Chateaubriand thought dishonest, and would not defend. This was the second time he had gone out from honourable motives. The first was in 1816, for having attacked a measure contrary to the Constitution in his greatest political work. This honourable conduct ever commanded Madame Récamier's devotion; in her eyes he was the personification of the noble in character besides being the first literary genius of his time. Mathieu de Montmorency, ever faithful to himself, expresses his generous approbation. He writes, "His behaviour is simple, noble, and courageous; he went quietly back to his former place in the Chamber." The Duc de Dondeauville, who was of the Villèle party, and soon had a seat in the cabinet, was one of Madame Récamier's best friends. He often complains of the violence with which M. de Chateaubriand now attacks the government, both in the Journal des Débats and in his own pamphlets, and assures her that if she were there, she might soften his asperity. The virulence and talent in his pamphlets did the Royalist party a great deal of harm. In September Louis XVIII. died, and Charles X. succeeded him. He kept the ministry formed by Louis XVIII.

In May 1825 Madame Récamier returned to Paris. M. de Chateaubriand hastened to see her the moment he learnt she was at the Abbaye-au-Bois. He was in raptures at her return, but not a word of reproach was exchanged. She saw by the delight with which he returned to his former habits what respectful tenderness he entertained for her. He was again the same, nay, better than when she first knew him; and she now understood that the sacrifice she had imposed on herself had its reward. From that time his sentiments were unalterable. The joy of returning to her family, of finding them all well, and herself more necessary than ever to M. de Chateaubriand, gave her some of those moments of unmixed happiness which can only be of short duration.

In 1825 Mathieu de Montmorency was elected a member of the Academy, and in January 1826 he was named to preside over the education of the Duc de Bordeaux. It seemed the place he ought to occupy. It was one of those rare occasions when a good man is honoured as he ought to be, and it seemed not unreasonable to hope that by the education of the heir to the throne Montmorency's virtues would have a