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Updated: May 17, 2025
Paris was full of foreigners of distinction, who were curious to know a person of so much celebrity, and they swelled the ranks of her admirers. Among them was the Duke of Wellington, who, if Madame Récamier's vanity did not mislead her, was willing and anxious to wear her chains. But she never forgave his boastful speech after the Battle of Waterloo.
She believed in him, and "there are few things so pleasant," says a writer in Fraser, "as to have a woman at hand that believes in you." Madame Récamier's insight never disturbed Châteaubriand, for it was of the heart, not of the intellect. It was not a critical analysis that probes and dissects, but a sympathy that cheered and tranquillized.
She continually contrasted Madame Récamier's beauty with her own plain appearance, her friend's power of fascination with her own lesser faculty of interesting, and she repeatedly declared that Madame Récamier was the most enviable of human beings. But in comparing the lives of the two, as they now appear to us, Madame de Staël seems the more fortunate.
The conversation turning on Talma, who was then performing at the French theatre, the Princess put her box, which was opposite the Emperor's, at Madame Récamier's disposal; she used it twice, and each time the Emperor was present, and kept his glass so constantly in her direction that it was generally remarked, and it was reported that she was on the eve of high favor.
Madame Récamier's conduct to the Prince, even viewed in the light of her biographer's representations, is scarcely justifiable. Madame Möhl attempts to defend her. She alleges, that, at the time Prince Augustus was paying his addresses to her, he had contracted a left-handed marriage at Berlin.
Mme. Ancelot confesses to having "studied narrowly" all Mme. Récamier's manoeuvres, and to having watched all the thousand little traps she laid for social "lions"; but we are rather astonished herein at Mme. Ancelot's astonishment, for, with more or less talent and grace, these are the devices resorted to in Paris by a whole class of maitresses de maison, of whom Mme.
In this she is strangely mistaken. Madame Lenormant does not allude to the report at all. Still she tacitly contradicts it. Her account of Monsieur Récamier's course with regard to the divorce proposed between him and his wife is of itself a sufficient refutation of this idle story. Monsieur Récamier was a tall, vigorous, handsome man, of easy, agreeable manners.
I find chronicled a long talk with Mohl one evening at Madame Récamier's. The room was very full of notable people of all sorts, and the tide of chattering was running very strong. "Reputations are made and pass away. It is impossible that they should endure. It is in such places as this that they are destroyed. The friction is prodigious!"
Having deliberately read letter and paper, she put the former in her pocket, and returned the latter with a stately yet graceful inclination of the head, that would have been creditable in Mdm. Recamier's salon.
Madame de Krüdener, celebrated for her mysticism and the power she exerted over the Emperor Alexander, then held nightly reunions, beginning with prayer and ending in a more worldly fashion. Madame Récamier's entrance always caused distraction, and Madame de Krüdener commissioned Benjamin Constant to write and beseech her to be less charming.
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