"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.