Interrupting the narrative of the author of Adolphe[342], I will say that, in this society following upon the Terror, everybody feared to have the air of possessing a home. People met in the public places, especially in the Pavillon de Hanovre[343]: when I saw that pavilion, it was deserted like the hall of a yesterday's feast, or like a stage from which the actors had descended for ever. There were wont to come together young women escaped from prison, whom André Chénier had made to say:

Je ne veux point mourir encore[344].

Madame Récamier had met Danton on his road to execution and, soon after, she saw some of the fair victims snatched from men who had themselves become victims of their own fury.

I come back to my guide Benjamin Constant:

"Madame Récamier's mind had need of another food. The instinct for the beautiful caused her to delight beforehand, without knowing them, in men distinguished by a reputation for talent and genius.

"M. de La Harpe was one of the first to appreciate this woman who was destined one day to group around herself all the celebrities of her age. He had met her in her childhood, he saw her again married, and the conversation of this young person of sixteen years possessed a thousand attractions for a man whom his excessive self-esteem and the habit of intercourse with the most intelligent men in France rendered extremely difficult and hard to please.

"M. de La Harpe divested himself, in the presence of Madame Récamier, of most of the defects which made commerce with him laborious and almost insupportable. He took pleasure in acting as her guide: he admired the swiftness with which her mind made good her want of experience and grasped all that he revealed to her concerning the world and mankind. It was at the time of the famous conversion which so many people have qualified as hypocrisy. I have always regarded that conversion as sincere. The sentiment of religion is an inherent faculty in man; it is absurd to pretend that fraud and falsehood have created that faculty. Nothing is put into the human soul except what nature has put there. The persecutions, the abuses of authority in favour of certain dogmas can delude us personally and revolt us against what we should feel if it were not imposed upon us; but, so soon as the external causes have ceased, we return to our primitive tendency: when there is no more courage in resisting, we no longer applaud ourselves for our resistance. Now, the Revolution having taken this merit from unbelief, the men whom vanity alone had rendered unbelieving were able to become religious in good faith.

"M. de La Harpe was of that number; but he retained his intolerant character and that bitterness of disposition which made him conceive new hatreds without abjuring the old ones. All those thorns of his devotion disappeared, however, when he was with Madame Récamier."

M. de La Harpe.

Here are a few fragments of the letters from M. de La Harpe to Madame Récamier of which Benjamin Constant speaks:

"Saturday, 28 September.

"What, madame, you carry your kindness so far as to wish to honour a poor outlaw like myself with a visit! This time I might say, like the ancient patriarchs, whom I resemble so little otherwise, that 'an angel has come into my house.' I well know that you like to do works of mercy; but, as things go nowadays, all good is difficult, and this like the rest. I must inform you, to my great regret, that to come alone is first of all impossible, for many reasons: among others that, with your youth and your face, the splendour of which will follow you everywhere, you could not travel without a waiting-maid, to whom prudence forbids me to confide the secret of my retreat, which is not mine alone. You would therefore have only one means of carrying out your generous resolution, which would be to take counsel with Madame de Clermont, who would bring you one day to her little sylvan castle, and from there it would be very easy for you to come with her. You are both made to appreciate and love one another.... I am writing many verses at this moment. In writing them, I often reflect that I shall one day be able to read them to the fair and charming Juliet, whose mind is as penetrating as her glance, and her taste as pure as her soul. I would also willingly send you the fragment of Adonis which you like, although it has become a little profane for me; but I would want a promise that it shall not leave your hands....

"Farewell, madame; I indulge with you in ideas which anyone but yourself would think very extraordinary addressed to a person of sixteen years; but I know that your sixteen years are only in your face[345]."

"Saturday[346].

"It is long indeed, madame, since I had the pleasure of talking with you, and, if you be sure, as you must be, that this is one of my privations, you will make me no reproaches....

"You have read in my soul; you have seen there that I wore in it the mourning for the public misfortunes and for my own faults, and I could not but feel that this sad disposition formed too strong a contrast with all the brilliancy that encompasses your age and your charms. I even fear lest it should sometimes have made itself felt in the few moments which I have been permitted to spend with you, and I entreat your indulgence therefore. But now, madame, when Providence seems to show us a better future very near at hand, to whom could I better than to yourself confide the joy which I derive from hopes so sweet and, to my belief, so near? Who will fill a greater place than you in the private pleasures which will be mingled with the public joy? I shall then be more susceptible and less unworthy of the delights of your charming company, and how happy I shall deem myself still to count for something in it! If you deign to attach the same value to the fruit of my labour, you shall always be the first to whom I shall hasten to present it. Then no more contradictions nor obstacles; you shall always find me at your orders, and none, I hope, will be able to blame me for this preference. I shall say, 'Here is she who, at the age of illusions and with all the brilliant advantages that can excuse them, has known all the nobility and delicacy of proceedings of the purest friendship and, in the midst of every homage, has remembered an outlaw!' I shall say, 'Here is she whose youth and grace I have seen grow amid a general corruption which was never able to overtake them, she whose reason at sixteen years has often put mine to shame!' and I am sure that none will be tempted to contradict me."

The sadness of events, of age and of religion, hidden under a melting expression, present in these letters a singular admixture of thought and style. Let us return once more to Benjamin Constant's narrative: