Mailed, post paid, to any address, on receipt of the price, by the Publishers,
ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston.
Memoirs and Correspondence of Madame Récamier.
TRANSLATED and Edited by Miss Luyster. 1 vol., 16mo., with a finely engraved Portrait. Price $2.00.
“The diversified contents of this volume can hardly fail to gain for it a wide perusal. It has the interest, in a greater or less degree, of history and romance; of truth stranger than fiction; of personal sketches; of the curious phases of an exceptional social life; of singular admixtures of piety and folly, of greatness and profligacy, fidelity and intrigue, all mingling or revealed in connection with the prolonged career of one who was, in certain respects, the most remarkable woman of her time.”—Boston Transcript.
“With nothing like the talents which immortalized the author of Corinne, Madame Récamier won herself a place of not less social influence among the men and women of her day. We must clearly look elsewhere than either to intellect, wealth, beauty, or all three combined, for the secret of that witchery which was so distinctive of her. There was something, we are led to infer, in her constitutional temperament, which, even beyond her delicate and indefinable tact, may afford the real clew to much of her mysterious ascendency. Love seems to have existed in her as a yearning of the soul almost entirely free from those elements of passion which are grounded in the difference of the sexes. There was in it not so much of the desire which centres in a single object, as of the emotion which seeks to diffuse itself over the very widest sphere of objects. It could thus be warm and deep, while pure and inaccessible to evil. Sainte-Beuve’s remark, that she had carried the art of friendship to perfection, helps us here to give the true key to her character. A warm and constant friend, she never admitted, never showed herself, a lover. Satisfied with the arrangement which gave her from an early age nothing more than the name and status of a wife, she could let her natural affection range with freedom and security wherever it met with a response that left intact her dignity and self-respect. Such coquetry as she showed arose rather from an instinctive desire to please and attract, than from anything approaching to a vicious instinct, or a silly desire to swell the list of her conquests. What seemed to begin in flirtation never went to the point of danger, and men who at first sight loved her passionately usually ended by becoming her true friends.”—The London Saturday Review.
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Mailed, post paid, to any address, by the Publishers,
ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston.
Transcriber's Note