MADAME RECAMIER
THE FROZEN-HEARTED ANGEL
Paris--the hopelessly mixed, ~sans-culotte~-philosopher new Paris
society of 1793--took a holiday from red slaughter and reflection on
the Rights of Man, and went to an odd wedding.
The wedding of a fifteen-year-old girl to a man of nearly fifty.
Probably, even in that less bromidic day, there were not lacking a few
hundred guests to commit the ancient wheeze anent May and December.
The girl was a beauty of the type that it tightens one's throat to
look at. And the man was an egregiously rich banker. So Paris deigned
to be interested; interested even into momentary forgetfulness of the
day's "List of the Condemned" and of Robespierre's newest patriotic
murder dreams.
The girl bride was Jeanne Francoise Julie Adelaide Bernard, daughter
of no less a dignitary than the Paris' receiver of taxes--a
mild-mannered and handsome man, weak and stupid, with a handsome and
steel-eyed wife, who was neither dull, weak, nor good.
The groom was Jacques Recamier--by profession a powerful banker, by
choice a middle-class Lothario. His father had sold hats at Lyons.
Recamier had been an intimate friend of the Bernards, forever at their
house, since a year or so before Jeanne had been born.
As the wedding party stood on the steps of the Hotel de Ville, after
the "civil ceremony"--so runs the story--a passing man halted and
gazed long and closely at Jeanne, in dumb admiration, studying every
line of her face and form. The gazer was a painter, Greuze by name.
And from Jeanne Recamier, as he saw her that day, he drew the
inspiration for the wonderful "~Jeune fille~" picture that made
him immortal.
The wedding party filed into a line of waiting carriages. But scarce had
the joyous cavalcade set out on its short journey when it was halted by
the passage of a truly horrible procession that just then emerged from a
cross street; a procession made up of scarecrow men and women, hideous
of visage, clad in rags, blood from the guillotine--around which they
had lately gathered, gloating--spattered on their clothes and unwashed
faces.
In the midst of the howling and huzzaing throng was a chair, carried
by supports on the shoulders of eight half-naked ~sans-culottes~.
And in this lofty chair crouched the most hideous figure in all that
vile gathering--a dwarfish, weirdly dressed man, his face disgustingly
marred by disease, his eyes glaring with the light of madness.
Around him gamboled the mob, screaming blessings and adulations,
strewing his bearers' way with masses of wilted flowers, filched from
the ~halls~.
Thus did Doctor Jean Paul Marat make his triumphal return home that
April day from the Convention, escorted by his worshipers--and fellow
beasts. Thus did his obscene retinue block the wedding procession of
dainty little Jeanne Recamier. Jean Paul Marat--for whose shrunken
chest, at that very moment, poor, politics-crazed Charlotte Corday was
sharpening the twenty-eight-cent case knife she had just bought.
An odd omen for the outset of married life; and vitally so to the
little new-wed Recamier girl, who had been brought up amid
superstitions.
Shall we glance at a short word picture of Jeanne, limned by a
contemporary?
"She has orange-tinted eyes, but they are without fire; pretty and
transparent teeth, but incapable of snapping; an ungainly waist;
coarse hands and feet; and complexion that is a bowl of milk wherein
float rose leaves."
Let me add to the sketch the established fact that, during the
seventy-one years of her life, no man so such as boasted that he had
received a caress or a love word from her. But don't lose interest in
her, please, on that account. Dozens of men would blithely have tossed
away their souls for the privilege of making that boast truthfully.
Failing, they nicknamed her "the angel of the frozen heart." Against
her, alone, perhaps of all super-women, no word of scandal was ever
breathed. (Chiefly, it has been claimed, for physical reasons.)
Let me touch, as briefly as I can, on a story at which Madame
Lenormand, her own cousin, broadly hints and which Turquan openly
declares true. Says the former, among other and closer comments on the
theme:
"Madame Recamier received from her husband but his name. His affection
was paternal. He treated as a daughter the woman who carried his
name."
Says Turquan:
"She was Recamier's daughter."
And so, by all testimony, she was. Years before, Recamier had had a
love affair with Madame Bernard; an affair that the stupid Bernard had
condoned, if he had known of its existence. Nor, said gossip of the
day, was it Madame Bernard's sole indiscretion.
Jeanne had been born. From her earliest babyhood, Recamier had all but
worshiped her. Not a day had passed but he had come to see her. He had
loaded her with toys, jewelry, candy. He had been her fairy godfather.
She had grown up calling him "Daddy Recamier."
Then came the Reign of Terror. Old Bernard's life was in considerable
danger. In fact he used to go to the guillotine daily to watch
executions, "that he might become used to his fate." Madame Bernard
was no fit guardian for a young and incredibly lovely girl in the
rotten Paris of that day.
So Recamier, rich and powerful, chose the surest means to safeguard
the daughter who was all the world to him. He went through a
meaningless "civil ceremony" with her; and installed her, with a
retinue of servants, in one-half of his big house. Then and thereafter
she was Madame Recamier in name alone; Recamier tenderly watching over
her, giving her every luxury money could buy, and observing with a
total absence of jealousy her innumerable conquests.
These conquests had begun, by the way, even before Jeanne's early
marriage. When she was but thirteen, a young man named Humblot had
fallen madly in love with her. To keep Jeanne from reciprocating his
flame, she had been packed off to a convent school.
Shortly after the marriage, the Reign of Terror simmered down to the
more peaceful if more corrupt Directory. Society reassembled on its
peak, after the years of guillotine-aided class leveling. And, in this
heterogeneous society, Jeanne blazed forth as a star. Says
Sainte-Beuve:
"The world Madame Recamier traversed at this period was very mixed and
very ardent."
To its adoration the girl bride lent an amused but wholly impersonal
ear. Vaguely she used to wonder why men wept at her feet and poured
forth their souls in noisy love for her. Their antics found no
response in her own untouched heart. Yet she found them interesting,
and therefore in a demure way she encouraged them. Not that such
encouragement was really needed.
Presently, out of the chaos of social and political conditions, arose
Napoleon Bonaparte. Yes, I know he appears unduly often in this
series. But he appeared unduly often in the lives of a score of
super-women--Madame Jumel, Elizabeth Paterson, Madamoiselle Georges,
Countess Potocka, and the rest--and his name is more often seen in all
history, written since 1790, than that of any other man. So be patient
if he crops up oftener than the balance of power seems to call for.
Napoleon, first as dictator and then as emperor, ruled France. As a
young man, he had been too poor and too busy to glance at any woman.
Now in his days of power and--for him--leisure, he amply made up for
such early defects. And presently his alternately pale and jet-black
eyes fell upon Jeanne Recamier. Forthwith, he began to make right
ardent love to her.
Napoleon, once and only once in all his strange career, had actually
lost his level head through love and had been carried by it out of his
cool, calculating self. That was when, as a lean, half-starved, hectic
young officer of artillery, he had met Josephine Beauharnais.
She was a Creole widow, much older than he. Much slush has been
written of her and her wrongs. History, from every source, tells
another story.
Napoleon used to meet Josephine at the house of the director, Barras,
where she held a somewhat equivocal position. Barras had begun to tire
of her. Her teeth were bad; she was beginning to wrinkle and grow
sallow; she was silly; she had absolutely nothing in common with the
late Mrs. Caesar.
To Napoleon, though, she was as a third-rate show to a country boy who
had never before visited the theatre. She was divine. Barras saw; and
he also saw a chance to rid himself of a burden and at the same time
to attach to himself a growingly useful friend.
Barras persuaded Josephine to marry Napoleon--whom she did not even
pretend to love--by saying that the young man had a great future.
Then, as a wedding present, he gave Napoleon command of the ragged,
mutinous Army of Italy.
Napoleon, after turning that army into such a fighting machine as the
world had never before known, thrashed Italy and Austria and came home
the hero and idol of the hour--to find, beyond all doubt or hope, that
Josephine was unfaithful to him! He ordered her out of his house. She
wept. Her family wept. Every one wept. Every one pleaded. Napoleon
shrugged his shoulders and let her stay. But ever thereafter he
treated her with mere friendly tolerance. His love for her was
stone-dead. And he amused himself wherever amusement could be found.
Also, when it suited his turn in after years he calmly divorced her.
"Lefebvre," said Napoleon, in Egypt, "what is Josephine doing at this
moment?"
"Weeping for your return," promptly babbled the future Duke of
Dantzig.
"Lefebvre," soulfully returned Napoleon, "you're a fool or a liar! Or
both. She is riding a white horse in the Bois, in the worst kind of
company she can find at such short notice."
Men of rank and wit were choking Madame Recamier's salon to
overflowing. She was the inaccessible goal of a hundred Don Juans'
ambitions. Grandees of the old and the new regime as well--aristocrats
of the noblesse--who would not deign to visit the Tuileries while the
Corsican adventurer held sway in that house of kings--all flocked to
the Recamier home and vied with one another to do Jeanne honor.
Her beauty, her siren charm, her snowy--or frosty--virtue were the
talk of France. What more natural than that Napoleon should seek out
this new paragon; that sheer conceit as well as genuine love should
make him burn to succeed where all the world had failed?
Other women--women whose houses he could not have entered, seven years
earlier, save as a dependent--were making fools of themselves over the
Man of Destiny. He had but to throw the handkerchief for a hundred
frail beauties to scramble for its possession. Irresistible, perfect
in power and in the serene knowledge of that power, he deigned to make
lazy love to Jeanne Recamier.
She was not used to lazy love-making. She did not understand it, but
took it for a mere new mannerism of the hypermanneristic emperor. Her
seeming indifference had the same effect on Napoleon as might a war
campaign that promised grave obstacles. It turned his idle fancy to
keen pursuit. Madame Recamier failed to be impressed. Napoleon,
thinking he must be mistaken in the idea that any living woman could
fail to be dazzled by his attentions, made his meaning quite clear.
Only to meet with a very good-humored but extremely definite rebuff
from his charmer.
It was past his understanding. He stooped to bribes; offering to put a
big share of the state finances through the Recamier bank, and, with
much pomp and ceremony, announcing the appointment of Madame Recamier
as one of the Empress Josephine's ladies in waiting.
This was a master stroke--a ~tour de force~--a knock-out--anything you
will. For, fat and curved-nosed bankers throughout the empire were
yelping for slices of the state finances. And the post of lady in
waiting was one for which nearly any woman of the court would gladly
have parted with all she no longer possessed.
Then came a shock; a rough, jarring shock; a shock worthy to be
administered by, instead of to, the Corsican himself. Madame Recamier
coldly refused the glittering offers; declined to be a lady in
waiting; and gave Napoleon to understand, in terms he could not
mistake, that she wanted nothing from him except unadulterated
absence.
It was probably the emperor's one heart rebuff.
In a burst of babyish fury, he--the ruler of France and the arbiter of
Europe's fate--crawled so low as to seek revenge on a harmless woman.
He first wrecked the Recamier bank, driving old Recamier to the verge
of ruin. Then he trumped up an asinine charge of treason or ~les
majeste~ or something equally absurd, against Jeanne. And on the
strength of it, he banished her from Paris.
It was a revenge well worthy the eccentric who could rule or ruin half
of Europe by a single convolution of his demigod brain; or could
screech in impotent fury at a valet for getting the wrong part in his
thin hair.
From Paris went the Recamiers; the banker seeking gently to console
his unhappy wife for the ruin she had so innocently wrought; and to
build up for her, bit by bit, a new fortune to replace the lost one.
Never by word or look did he blame her. And speedily he amassed enough
money to supply her again with the luxuries she loved.
To Lyons, the old home of both of them, they went; thence to Rome, and
then to Naples. In Italy, Jeanne met once more her dearest woman
friend; a ludicrously homely woman with the temper of a wet cat and a
tongue sharp enough to shave with; a complete foil, mentally and
facially, for her bosom friend, Jeanne.
This miracle of homeliness was Madame de Stael, author and futile
conspirator. For exercising the latter accomplishment, she had been
banished, like Jeanne, from Paris. So ugly was Madame de Stael that
when she once said to an ill-favored man:
"You abuse the masculine prerogative of homeliness," her hearers
laughed--at her, not at her victim.
In Italy, too, Jeanne met Prince Augustus of Prussia, prince-royal and
man of distinction and wealth. They met at a reception. Madame
Recamier and Madame de Stael were seated side by side on a sofa. After
the introductions, Prince Augustus seated himself between them,
remarking airily:
"I find myself placed between Wit and Beauty."
"And possessing neither," commented Madame de Stael, with her wonted
courtesy.
The prince, from that inauspicious start, became the infatuated slave
of Madame Recamier. He worshiped the ground she trod. He made no
secret of his devotion.
In those days the title of prince-royal carried real weight, and the
gulf between prince and commoner was well-nigh unbridgeable. Love made
Prince Augustus waive all this disparity. The fact that Madame
Recamier was a mere commoner grew to mean nothing to him. At the risk
of disgrace at home and of possible loss of rank and fortune, the
prince entreated Jeanne to divorce Recamier and to marry his
royal-blooded self.
It was a brilliant offer, one that ninety-nine commoners out of a
hundred would have seized with alacrity; for it was not a morgantic
union he proposed--he wanted to make Jeanne his princess.
The prince went to Recamier and frankly stated his wishes. To his
amaze, instead of challenging the wooer, Recamier at once agreed to
let Jeanne get the divorce, on any grounds she chose--or an annulment
of their marriage, which would have been still simpler--and marry
Prince Augustus.
Always impersonal and adoring in his attitude toward Jeanne, Recamier
now urged her to secure her own best interests by giving him up and
becoming the prince's wife; a sacrifice far easier to understand in a
father than in a husband.
But Jeanne put aside the offer without a tremor of hesitation, turning
her back on the wealth and title of a princess in order to remain with
the bankrupt old commoner whom the world called her husband. For,
again, physical reasons intervened.
Lucien Bonaparte, one of the emperor's several brothers, was another
ardent wooer. He shone in reflected glory, as his brother's brother,
until he seemed quite royal. But to him, as to all the rest,
Jeanne--after a wholly harmless and pleasant flirtation--gave a
decided refusal.
General Bernadotte, on a foreign mission for the emperor, sought her
out. He was a military chief who had fought like a hero and on whom
court honors had since fallen thick. He sought, soldier fashion, to
carry Jeanne's icy defenses by storm; only to fail as all had failed
and to go home grumbling that his majesty had done well to exile so
unapproachable a beauty before she had a chance to drive every man in
France mad with chagrin.
Benjamin Constant, too--cunning statesman of the old school--loved
her. And in his strange, unfathomable mind she found a certain
fascination; the more so when she discovered that she could twist that
mind to her own purposes. So, instead of dismissing Constant like the
rest, she made it clear that she did not love him and then kept him as
a friend.
Strong use did she make of that friendship, too, in revenging herself
on Napoleon for banishing her. Constant's mighty if tortuous acts of
statescraft, just before and just after Napoleon's downfall, have been
laid to her influence.
Another exile--General Moreau, Napoleon's oft-time rival in both war
and love--now sought to win where his enemy had lost. And he failed.
He was the same General Moreau who a few years earlier had paid court
to Betty Jumel and had given her as a love gift a huge gilt-and-prism
chandelier which later hung in the Jumel mansion in New York. But he
found Jeanne as cold as Betty had been kind, and in time he, too,
departed, hopeless.
The next victim was no less a personage than the King of Naples. He
was Murat, ex-tavern waiter, peerless cavalry leader, and husband of
Napoleon's shrew sister, Caroline Bonaparte. The emperor, after
conquering the separate Italian states, had placed his ex-waiter
brother-in-law on the Neapolitan throne.
When Jeanne reached Naples, Queen Caroline received her with open arms
and invited her to be a guest at the palace. Murat's admiration for
the lovely visitor was undisguisable. And--though it has been denied
by one biographer that Jeanne was responsible for his treason--almost
at once after her arrival, he began to intrigue with Napoleon's
enemies. Form your own conclusions, as did folk of the time.
Soon afterward, weakened by the idiotic Russian campaign, Napoleon was
set upon by a host of foes. Men who had licked his boots fell over one
another to join the alliance against him.
The lion was wounded, and the dog pack was at his throat.
As soon as Napoleon had been hustled off into exile, the Recamiers
returned to Paris, as did practically all the army of people he had
banished. The banker's fortune was looking up, and they could live in
something of their old style there.
Paris, in those first weeks of the "Restoration," was as full of
kings, emperors, princes, and dukes as a subway rush-hour train of
newspaper readers. One could hardly walk a block without stumbling
over a monarch or a commander-in-chief or a princeling.
The heads of the allied armies were still there, strutting gallantly
about--they would have run up a tree, two years earlier--and bragging
of Napoleon's fall.
There was Alexander, Czar of Russia, gigantic and bearlike, who had
once cringed to Napoleon, then frozen and starved him in the Moscow
campaign, and now was one of the chiefs of the alliance. There, too,
was Blucher, who had tumbled off his horse at Waterloo, but who, none
the less, had done more than is placed to his credit to win the
victory that forever crushed Napoleon. It was he and his Prussians,
not Wellington and the English, who really won Waterloo for the
Allies.
Other sovereigns, other generals, there were, too. And, foremost among
them, a long, lean Irishman, with a bony face and a great hooked beak
of a nose. He was Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, titular Victor
of Waterloo and Man of the Hour.
The Duke of Wellington was not happily married. I think no retroactive
libel law can attack me for saying this, for he himself made no secret
of it. And he was far from being an exponent to stern British
morality.
Indeed, one object of his affections, Miss Jenkins, wrote of him to a
friend:
"It was all I could do to prevent His Grace from throwing himself on
his knees before me in sinful adulation."
I fear he would have roused crass horror in the bosom of the
mid-Victorian matron who, on seeing Shakespeare's "Antony and
Cleopatra," exclaimed:
"How different was Cleopatra's home life from that of our own gracious
queen!"
The duke fell victim to Jeanne Recamier's charm. He, the official Man
of the Hour, became a fixture at her salons--but for a very brief
time. One day, when he was calling on her, a number of other guests
being present, the duke made some would-be-witty remark about France.
Jeanne chose to interpret his words as a slur on her beloved country.
Roused for once from her wonted gentleness, she ordered Wellington out
of her house.
By the next day all Paris knew that Madame Recamier had shown the
omnipotent Duke of Wellington the door. And all Paris--which adored
Jeanne and hated the English hero--went wild with delight. Jeanne's
popularity from that moment was boundless.
Soon afterward, Wellington found that stern duty called him, somewhat
hastily, to London. Whither, to his disgust, the story of his
ejectment from Madame Recamier's salon had preceded him.
Canova, the premier sculptor of his day--he who later paid such
assiduous court to Elizabeth Paterson--fell in love with Jeanne. So
indelibly was her wonder face stamped on his mind that, without her
knowing it, he was able to make two busts of her.
When the busts were done, Canova--who was constantly receiving and
rejecting offers of fabulous sums to make portrait busts--showed her
his labors of love. But Jeanne's beauty went hand in hand with vanity.
She thought the busts over which he had toiled so happily did not do
her justice. And without a word she turned away from the inspection
and left the studio.
The sharp blow to his pride was too much for Canova. He dropped her
acquaintance forever; being perhaps the only one of Jeanne's adorers
to break his allegiance to her before she gave the word.
Recamier died. Jeanne, rich and still gloriously beautiful, received
shoals of proposals. She rejected them all. She had at last met the
love of her life. In the lives of all these super-women, you will have
noticed, there was some one man who stood out supreme above all the
host of lesser lovers; idolized, placed on a lofty pedestal, a wealth
of devotion lavished on him.
And so it was with Jeanne Recamier--although the affair from first to
last was starkly platonic. She who had laughed at an emperor, who had
rejected a prince's hand, who had turned the most famous man in Europe
out of her house, lost her head and her heart to a cranky, bearlike
author-adventurer, Francois Auguste de Chateaubriand. Your grandmother
read and wept over his American novel, "Atala."
Chateaubriand was a heartbreaker. As a mere youth, his talent for
transferring his allegiance with lightning speed from one woman to
the next had won for him the sobriquet "~L'Inconstant~." He had
traveled in the American wilderness, living among Indian tribes; had
hobnobbed with George Washington, to whom he had brought letters of
introduction; had been sent fleeing for his life from France during
the Terror; had been a favorite of Napoleon's until the Corsican's
tyranny disgusted him into turning conspirator.
Of late years he had wandered aimlessly about Europe, making love and
earning a scant living as a painter and writer. Sometimes broke,
sometimes flush, sometimes acclaimed as a genius, sometimes chased as
a political criminal, sometimes in palaces, sometimes in
jail--Chateaubriand at length met Jeanne Recamier.
From the first they loved each other. On neither side with it a
crazily passionate adoration. Rather was it the full, calm devotion of
mature hearts that seek safe harbor after many and battering storms.
When Recamier died, Chateaubriand formally asked Jeanne's hand in
marriage. She refused--for reasons best known to herself and her
physician. But they remained, for all the rest of their lives,
faithful and utterly devoted lovers.
Chateaubriand was uncouth, morbid, vain, bristling with a myriad
foibles and faults. Jeanne, very gently and tactfully, undertook to
cure him of these defects. With tender hands she gradually remolded
his wayward, eccentric nature, stripping away much of its dross,
bringing out its cleaner, nobler traits.
"You have transformed my character," he wrote her. "I know nothing
more beautiful nor more good than you."
When Recamier died, in 1830, Jeanne was a little over fifty.
Chateaubriand was sixty-two. A mature couple, withal. Yet Jeanne
looked scarce thirty, and Chateaubriand was still in his late prime.
Again and again he pleaded with Jeanne to marry him. Always she
refused, just as she refused a host of others, even in her mature
years. Indeed, she received and rejected a proposal of marriage when
she was seventy.
The rest of this story is not especially romantic. Perhaps it may not
interest you. For it has to do with "the breaking up of things."
The Recamier-Chateaubriand affair went on like an Indian summer, for
years. Then, as old age reached out for him, Chateaubriand's
eccentricities cropped out afresh. He fell into a melancholy, shut
himself away from the world that was at last growing to honor him,
became a recluse, and would see no one except Madame Recamier.
His melancholy deepened almost into mania. He had but one dream of
life left in his heart--his love for Jeanne. To her he clung like a
frightened child to a tender mother.
Then, in its saddest form, old age laid its cold hand across beautiful
Jeanne's orange-tinted eyes, and she became totally blind. Even in her
blindness she was still lovely, and her soul lost none of its
sweetness.
Sightless, she still guarded and sought to amuse the cranky old man
she so long had loved; bearing with his once-imperious temper, which
had now rotted into mere whining discontent; humoring his million
whims; talking softly to him, in his brighter moments, about the
gleaming past.
The melancholy old man, lovingly tended and nursed and amused like a
baby by the blind old woman who had been the reigning beauty of the
world, lingered on for several years longer.
When at last he died, Jeanne mourned him as never had she mourned
Recamier or any other. Chateaubriand's death broke her heart. It
broke, too, her last tie to earth. And within a few months she
followed her lover to the grave.
Thus, at seventy-two, died Jeanne Recamier, virgin heartbreaker, whose
very name was for half a century the synonym for absolute beauty and
flawless purity. I know of no other super-woman whose character in any
way resembles hers.
Which was, perhaps, more unlucky for the other super-woman than for
the men who loved them.