Her intellectual power and her tact formed, no doubt, one strong element of the attraction which drew and kept so many artists, philosophers, preachers, statesmen, and brilliant social leaders by her side. But her heroic and unconquerable truthfullness was a still more royal and authoritative trait. She sought for truth; she spoke truth; she indignantly denounced all falsehoods and shams. Some of her sentences on this point seem burned into the page, as by the flame of a blowpipe. "The whole literary and fashionable world is baked together of lies." To those who expressed their respect and admiration of her she said, "Natural candor, absolute purity of soul, and sincerity of heart are the only things worthy of homage: the rest is conventionality." She wrote to a friend, "Never try to suppress a generous impulse, or to crowd out a genuine feeling: despair or discouragement is the only fruit of dry reasoning, unenlightened by the heart." In the following sentence she betrays, by the law of opposites, the deepest charm of such a nature as her own; namely, a thoroughly sincere and fluent spontaneousness of character. "I have just found out the thing that I most utterly hate: it is pedantry. To see such a big nothing in full march is to me the most revolting and the most unendurable of all sights."
Another fine and winning quality in Rahel was her profound interest in exalted and original characters, and her ardent veneration for them. This drew them gratefully to her in return. She had an almost idolatrous admiration for Goethe. All aspirants for true interior greatness naturally love and revere those who exemplify their ideal to them. She once called Goethe and Fichte the first and second eyes of Germany. A soul capable of such enthusiasm for great souls is rare, and is most charming. Her maxim, like that of all the highest and strongest of the guiding souls of our race, was, "Act only from your inmost conscience, and only good will come to you." A vast, tonic freedom and charity breathe in some of her sentences. "A catholic sympathy with all possible systems; a resolute liberation from the exclusive trammels of any; an entire surrender into the hands of Him who wields all possibilities; and an honest dealing with the depths of our own hearts, this seems to me more than all philosophy, and a thing well pleasing to God."
It is no wonder that the favored friends of such a woman honored her even to the verge of worship, as we find then doing in their letters. Though not technically—or professedly a religious woman, she was really one. She felt the mystery of things; she revered the providential guides of the race; she owned the law of the whole; she bowed in submissive adoration before God. "Since the decease of my mother," she said, "I know death better. I see him everywhere. He has assumed a new power over me." A fatal disease struck her at sixty- two. Her husband scarcely left her bedside. Until the last, he continued to read her favorite books to her. The young Heine, how different then from the dreadful wreck he became! hearing that fresh rose-leaves, applied to her inflamed eyes, were grateful, sent her his first hook of poems, enveloped in a basket of roses. With what fitter words can we take leave of Rahel and her friends than these of her own: "I have thought an epitaph. It is this, Good men, when any thing good happens to mankind, then think affectionately in your peace also of mine."
The life of Madame Récamier is interesting, in a pre-eminent degree, on account of the warmth, elevation, and fidelity of the friendships which filled it. Her personal loveliness and social charm made her a universal favorite, and gave her an unparalleled celebrity. But, full as her career was of romantic adventures, rich as it was in brilliant associations, its keynote throughout, its strongest interest at every point, is friendship. Unlike those of so many of the famous women of France, her friendships were as remarkable for their rational soundness, purity, and tenacity, as for their fervor. They were free from every thing morbid or affected. An adverse fate forbade the love to which she seemed destined by her bewitching beauty and grace; and a certain divine chill in the blood, a stamp from Diana in the senses, turned all the warmth of affection upwards into the mind, to radiate thence in her face and manners, and to make her a high priestess of friendship. The pure and wise Ballanche, who idolized her, said that she was originally an Antigone, of whom people vainly wished by force to make an Armada.
Her nominal husband is supposed by some to have been in reality her father; the marriage being merely a titular one, to secure his fortune to her in case of his death by the guillotine, of which he was then in daily dread. Deprived of the usual domestic vents of affection, her rich heart naturally led her to crave the best substitute, friendship. And her matchless personal gifts, together with her truly charming traits of character, enabled her permanently to win and experience this in a very exalted degree. Her three principal friends were Montmorency, Ballanche, and Chateaubriand; all three original and extraordinary characters, and all three worthy in spite of some drawbacks on the part of the last of the extraordinary devotion she gave them. The letters of these three possess extreme interest. Especially, those of the first named are the unique monument of an affection whose purity and delicacy equalled its vivacity and depth.
Matthieu de Montmorency was one of the noblest of the nobility of France, alike in birth and in spirit. In his youth a voluptuous liver, he had afterwards undergone a genuine and solemn conversion. While in Switzerland, the news of the guillotining of his brother gave him such a shock, that it revolutionized his motives and his life. The gay, impassioned, fascinating man of the world became an austere and fervent Christian. The rich sensibility he had formerly spent in amours and display, henceforward ennobled by wisdom and sanctified by religion, lent a singular charm of tenderness and loftiness to his friendships. The memory of his own errors gave a gracious charitableness to his judgments; his sorrow imparted an incomparable refinement to his air; his grave and devout demeanor inspired veneration; his sweet magnanimity drew every unprejudiced heart. He had long been a fervent friend of Madame de Staid, when the youthful virgin-wife, the dazzling Julie Récamier, formed an engrossing attachment to that gifted woman. Drawn mutually to this common goal, the fore-ordained friends soon met. He was then fifty years old; she, twenty-three. Her extraordinary charms of person and spirit, her dangers, exposed, with such, bewildering beauty and such peculiar domestic relations, to all the seductions of a most corrupt society, awakened at once his admiration, his sympathy, and his pity. As an increasing intimacy revealed her irresistible sweetness of disposition, her many gifts and virtues, Montmorency found himself ever more and more drawn to her by the united bonds of reason, conscience, and affection. He undertook not merely to be her friend in the ordinary pleasures of sympathy, but, as a Christian, under the eye of God, sincerely and profoundly to befriend her. From that moment until his death, his devotion, though once severely tried, never faltered nor slumbered. He was to her more than a father and a brother; he was her guardian angel, as pure in feeling, as watchful to warn, to restrain, to encourage, to support, and console. For many years, through trying reverses of fortune, he visited her every evening. For many years each had a vital share in all that concerned the other; and, when he died, it was as if a large part of her being had been suddenly torn out of her soul, and transferred to heaven. The letters that passed between them form one of the most delightful and impressive records ever made of Christian friendship, a record in which wisdom and duty are as prominent as affection.
Pierre Simon Ballanche, one of the most delicate and philosophical of French authors, most disinterested and affectionate of men, the perfect model of a friend, was born at Lyons in 1776. He was first introduced to Madame Récamier, in 1812, by their common friend, the generous and eloquent Camille Jordan. Ballanche, in an enthusiastic attachment to a noble, portionless young girl, had suffered a disappointment so deep, that it caused him to dismiss all thoughts of marriage for ever. He sought to ease the burden of rejected love, by letting the sadness it had engendered exhale in a literary work. This exquisite work, called "Fragments," Jordan induced Madame Récamier to read: he also described to her the refined and magnanimous character of the author. Thus prepared, and aided by her own keen discernment, she immediately detected his choice talents, his rare vein of sentiment, his abiding hunger for affection. Ballanche was a philosopher of solitude, a poet and priest of humanity, spending his days far from the crowd and uproar of the world, his proper haunt the summits of the loftiest minds, the mysterious cradle of the destinies of society. His soul was an "AEolian harp," through which the music of the pre-historic ages played. Chastity and sorrow were two geniuses, who unveiled to him the destiny of man. His philosophy, so redolent of the heart and the imagination, amidst the material struggles and selfishness of the time, has been compared to a chant of Orpheus in the school of Hobbes. The friendship which Madame Récamier gave this lonesome, sad, expansive, and lofty spirit, was as if a goddess had come down from heaven on purpose to minister to him. She brought him the attention he needed, the sympathy he pined for, the position and praise which were so grateful to his sensitive nature. She strove to win for him from others the recognition he deserved, to call out his powers, and to show off his gift to the best advantage. Ballanche was timid, awkward, ugly, with no wealth, with no rank; but, in the sight of Madame Récamier, the treasures and graces of his soul were an intrinsic recommendation far superior to these outward advantages, and she was ready to honor it to the full.
Never was kindness more worthily bestowed; never was it more gratefully received. "I often," he says, "find myself astonished at your goodness to me. The silent, weary, sad man, whom others neglect, you notice, and seek with infinite tact to draw him out. You are indulgence and pity personified, and you compassionately see in me a kind of exile. Together with the feeling of a brother for a sister, I offer you the homage of my soul." From that time, he belonged to her, and could not bear to live separate from her. Under her appreciation and encouragement, he expanded, like a plant moved from a chill shade into the sunshine. His devotion was entire, and sought no equal return. It was simply the natural expression of his gratitude to her, his admiration of her, his delight in seeing her and in being with her. His love for her, like that of Dante for Beatrice, was a religious worship, a celestial exhalation of his soul, utterly free from every alloy of earth and sense. For thirty-four years, he was almost inseparable from her. He removed to Paris, that he might look on her every day. Wherever she travelled, abroad or at home, he was one of her companions. At her receptions of company, the fame of which has gone through the world, he was invariably an honored and active assistant. And, despite his deformed face, and uncouth appearance and bearing, he was a great favorite with all the chosen guests at the Abbaye-aux-Bois. To those who really knew him, his large, beaming eyes and noble forehead, his disinterested goodness, his literary and philosophical accomplishments, his modest unworldliness and attentive sympathy, redeemed his physical blemishes, and covered them with a radiance superior to that of mere beauty. The letters of Ballanche to Madame Récamier are charming in their originality. His praise of her is marked by an inimitable grace of sincerity and refinement:
"Your presence, so full of magic, the sweet reflection of your soul, will be to me a powerful inspiration. You are a perfect poem; you are poesy itself. It is your destiny to inspire, mine to be inspired. An occupation would do you good; your disturbed and dreamy imagination has need of aliment. Take care of your health, spare your nerves: you are an angel who has gone a little astray in coming into a world of agitation and falsehood."
What a reading of her inmost heart through her envied position, what matchless felicity of representation, in this picture of herself sent to her in one of his letters "The phoenix, marvellous but solitary bird, is said often to weary of himself. He feeds on perfumes, and lives in the purest region of the air; and his brilliant existence ends on a pyre of odoriferous woods, kindled by the sun. More than once, without doubt, he envies the lot of the white dove, because she has a companion like herself."