"I dared not, because I should have betrayed myself to him."
Prony says that Buonaparte was not obstinate in his own opinion with men of science about those things of which he was ignorant; but he would bear no contradiction in tactics or politics.
May 29.
Madame Recamier has no more taken the veil than I have, and is as little likely to do it. She is still beautiful, still dresses herself and her little room with elegant simplicity, and lives in a convent [Footnote: The Abbaye aux Bois.] only because it is cheap and respectable. M. Recamier is living; they have not been separated by anything but misfortune.
We have at last seen a comedy perfectly well acted—the first representation of a new piece, Les Folliculaires: it was received with thunders of applause, admirably acted in every character to the life. It was in ridicule of journalists and literary young men.
LA CELLE, M. DE VINDÉ'S COUNTRY HOUSE,
June 4.
Is it not curious that, just when you wrote to us, all full of Mrs. Strickland at Edgeworthstown, we should have been going about everywhere with Mr. Strickland at Paris? I read to him what you said about his little girl and Foster as he was going with us to a breakfast at Cuvier's, and he was delighted even to tears.
We breakfasted at Passy on our way here: beautiful views of Paris and its environs from all the balconied rooms; and Madame François showed us all their delightful comfortable rooms—the bed in which Madame Gautier and Madame François had slept when children, and where now her little Caroline sleeps. There is something in the duration of these family attachments which pleases and touches one, especially in days of revolution and change.
We arrived here in good time. La Celle [Footnote: La Celle St. Cloud, built by Bachelier, first valet de chambre of Louis XIV., afterwards sold to Madame de Pompadour, who sold it again in two years.] is as old as Clotwold, the son of Clovis, who came here to make a hermitage for himself—La Cellule. Wonderfully changed and enlarged, it became the residence of Madame de Pompadour. The rooms are wainscotted: very large croissées open upon shrubberies, with rose acacias and rhododendrons in profuse flower: the garden is surrounded by lime-trees thick and high, and cut, like the beech-walk at Collon, at the end into arches through the foliage, and the stems left so as to form rows of pillars, through which you see, on one side, fine views of lawn and distant country, while on the other the lime-grove is continued in arcades, eight or nine trees deep.