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.