Super-woman and super-man, they had loved as had Cleopatra and Antony. Only, in the latters' day, it was Rome's vengeance and not a creditor-warrant that cut short such golden romances.
CHAPTER XI
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.