"11 October.
"Here, madame, is the book which I had the honour to promise you. I have marked the things which I should like you to read....
"Come, madame, to tell me your story 'in these words,' as they do in the novels. Then I will afterwards ask you to write it in the form of recollections, which will be full of interest, because, in your earliest youth, you were cast, with a bewitching face and a mind full of shrewdness and penetration, into the midst of those whirlpools of errors and follies; because you have seen everything; and because, having preserved, during those stormy times, your religious sentiment, a pure soul, a stainless life, an impressionable and loyal heart, possessing neither envy nor hateful passions, you will depict everything in the truest colours. You are one of the phenomena of these days, and certainly the most amiable.
"You shall show me your 'Recollections;' my old experience will offer some advice, and you will write a useful and delightful work. Do not come and answer, 'I am not capable,' etc., etc. I will permit you no commonplaces; they are unworthy of your intelligence. You can cast back your eyes over the past without remorse: this is, at all times, the fairest of our privileges; in the days in which we live, it is an inestimable one. Avail yourself of it for the instruction of the young person[469] whom you are bringing up; it will be the greatest boon you can show her.
"Adieu, madame, permit me to tell you that I love you and that I embrace you with all my heart."
*
Now that Madame Récamier has returned to Paris[470], I will go back for some time to my first guides. The Queen of Naples, uneasy about the resolutions of the Congress of Vienna, wrote to Madame Récamier to find her a man who would be capable of handling her interests in Vienna. Madame Récamier applied to Benjamin Constant and asked him to draw up a memorandum. This circumstance had the most unfortunate influence upon the author of the memorandum; a stormy sentiment was the result of an interview. Under the empire of this sentiment, Benjamin Constant, already a violent Anti-Bonapartist, as is manifest in the Esprit de conquête[471], allowed opinions to overflow the course of which was soon changed by events. Thence arose a reputation for political fickleness baleful to statesmen.
Madame Récamier, while admiring Bonaparte, had remained true to her hatred against the oppressor of our liberties and the enemy of Madame de Staël. As for what concerned herself, she did not give it a thought and she made light of her exile. The letters which Benjamin Constant wrote to her at this time will serve as a study, if not of the human heart, at least of the human head: there we see all that could be made of a passion by an ironical and romantic, serious and poetical intelligence. Rousseau is not more genuine, but he mingles with his imaginary loves a sincere melancholy and a real reverie.
*
Meanwhile, Bonaparte had landed at Cannes; the perturbation due to his approach was beginning to make itself felt. Benjamin Constant wrote Madame Récamier this note:
"Forgive me if I avail myself of circumstances to trouble you; but the opportunity is too favourable. My fate will be decided in four or five days surely; for, though you used to like not to think so, in order to have to show me less interest, I am certainly, with Marmont, Chateaubriand and Lainé, one of the four most compromised men in France. It is, therefore, certain that, if we do not triumph, I shall in a week be either an outlaw or a fugitive, or in a cell or shot. Grant me then, during the two or three days which will precede the battle, as much of your time and as many of your hours as you can. If I die, you will be glad to have done me this kindness and you would be sorry to have afflicted me. My feeling for you is my life; one sign of indifference hurts me more than, four days hence, my sentence of death could do. And, when I feel that danger is a means of obtaining a sign of interest from you, I derive from it nothing but joy.
"Were you pleased with my article, and have you heard what people say of it?"
Benjamin Constant was right, he was as much compromised as I: attached to Bernadotte, he had served against Napoleon; he had published his work De l'esprit de conquête, in which he handled the "tyrant" more roughly than I handled him in my pamphlet De Bonaparte et des Bourbons. He crowned his perils by talking in the newspapers.
On the 19th of March, at the moment when Bonaparte was at the gates of the Capital, he had the firmness to affix his signature to an article in the Journal des Débats ending with this phrase:
"I shall not, like a wretched turn-coat, go creeping from one power to the other, covering infamy with sophisms and stammering out profane words to redeem a shameful life."