The extent to which women have been the occasions, the suggesters, and sustaining encouragers of artistic creations in literature, painting, sculpture, and music, will astonish any one who will take the trouble to look up the history of it. When Orpheus found that Eurydice was gone, he threw his harp away. Women have delighted to administer inspiration, praise, and comfort, to great poets, orators, philosophers, because it gratifies their natural talent for admiring, and because they are reverentially grateful to the genius which can so clearly read their secrets, and so powerfully portray their souls to themselves. Sophocles, the highest Greek poet, whose firm and delicate portraitures of feminine character were not equalled in antique literature, must have had many admirers and friends among the choice women of Athens. And Virgil, we cannot imagine any high- souled, refined woman knowing the tender Virgil without a respectful and affectionate attachment. Octavia fainted away when he read before her his undying description of the death of Marcellus. The kiss of Aileen Margaret on the lips of the sleeping minstrel, Alain Chartier, is a type of woman's homage to literary genius. The same thing was shown, a little earlier in the same century, at the funeral of Heinrich von Meissen, surnamed Frauenlob, from the infinite praises he had lavished on the Virgin Mary, and on the female sex in general. After his death in the outer quarters of the cathedral at Mayence, which were set apart for hospitality to strangers and honored guests, a great company of women, it is related, sighing and weeping, bore his coffin to the burial, and poured into his sepulchre such an abundance of wine as ran over the whole circumference of the church. Five hundred years later, the women of Mayence celebrated his memory by tributary eulogies, and by the erection of a beautiful new monument, faced with a marble portrait of him.
Bernardin Saint Pierre says, "There is in woman an easy gayety, which scatters the sadness of man." It may be said, on the other hand, that there is in the man of literary genius a masterly insight, joined with sympathetic tenderness and masculine strength, which administers to woman that reflective and glorifying interpretation, and that supporting guidance, whereof she continually stands in such need. What woman would not be proud and grateful at receiving such a tribute as that which Waller paid to the Countess of Carlisle, on seeing her dressed in mourning?
When from black clouds no part of sky is clear,But just so much as lets the sun appear,Heaven then would seem thy image, and reflectThose sable vestments and that bright aspect.A spark of virtue by the deepest shadeOf sad adversity is fairer made:No less advantage doth thy beauty get,A Venus rising from a sea of jet!
What woman capable of appreciating the genius of Racine could read the works in which his choice thoughts and effusive sentiments are enshrined, purified and confirmed echoes of the finest sighs ever breathed by the heart, and not be drawn to him honoring esteem and love? It was this mastery of the interior life, this impassioned voicing of its subtilest secrets, that made Rousseau so irresistibly attractive to women. To the many who befriended him, or paid precious tributes to him in his life, the name of Madame de Verdelin has recently been added, by the publication of her correspondence. Sainte Beuve has prefixed her recovered portrait in an essay marked by his best touches. After quoting her final letter, he says, "From that day, Madame de Verdelin wholly disappears. She is known only through Rousseau. A ray of his glory fell on her; that ray—withdrawn, she repasses into the shade, and every trace is lost." The gifted critic says he feels a deep gratification in thus recalling the image of this generous woman. "She is a conquest for us: we pay the debt of Rousseau to her." He concludes what he has written with reference to these friendships of mind to mind, these intimacies of intelligence and feeling, these affections of women and authors, more tender than those of men, and yet quite distinct from love, by saying, with instructive emphasis, "Evidently, social morality has taken a step forward: a new chapter, unknown to the ancients, too much forgotten by the moderns, is henceforth to be added in all treatises of friendship."
Perhaps no author has ever written more that must speak with irresistible power to the inmost hearts of all women who have souls sensitive enough, complex, cultivated, and forcible enough, for an adequate reaction on the richness of his works, than Jean Paul Richter. In all the heights and depths and subtilties of the natural affections, and of imaginative or ideal emotion, as well as in truthful and endlessly varied expressions of those mysteries, he has no equal, scarcely a rival, in literature. In spite of his poverty and confining toil, he made, in his day, a profound personal sensation. And such is the personal spell of his ineffable tenderness, nobleness, and grandeur, even as exerted on the reader from his printed pages, that many a strong man, pilgriming thither from remote lands, has been known to kneel with convulsive emotion on his lowly grave at Bayreuth. His life was heroic in labor, and spotless in purity. When his heart sank in death, it seems as though the earth itself ought to have collapsed with the breaking of so great a thing. His sensibility was a world-harp, responding to every tremulous breath of air or flame. Sweet, pure, wise, mighty, modest, no wonder he drew upon himself the affectionate interest of many lofty ladies, and found treasures of inspiration and solace in their conversation and letters. Reviewing his life in the circle of his friends, he seems as a sun, with pale and burning moons and planets revolving around him. Charlotte von Kalb; Caroline Herder; Emilie von Berlepsch; Josephine von Sydow; the mother and the wife of Carl August; the daughters of the Duke of Mecklenburg, to whom, as "The Four Lovely and Noble Sisters on the Throne," he dedicated his "Titan," such, with many others like them, were the gracious women with whom Jean Paul, in his much-tried life, interchanged homage, friendly counsels, and sacred joys. The intelligent and enthusiastic praises they poured on him for his works must have been to him a divine luxury. And ah I how much he needed such comforts, he who could say, in one of his frequent moments of sadness, "Reckoning off from the neighborhood of my heart, I find life cold and empty"! A whole volume of his before unpublished "Correspondence with Renowned Women" was given to the public in 1865, a glowing treasury of gems of the heart.
Rahel Levin was such a fascinating queen of society, such a signal and fortunate mistress of friendships with celebrated men, that her character and career are on this account full both of interest and instruction. The secrets of influence, the charms that attract attention, awaken confidence, exert authority, dispense pleasure, and minister to human wants, are scarcely anywhere more clearly shown than in her person and story. The pronounced character, the uncommon talents, the rare combination of extreme candor and tact, the broad, intellectual culture, and impulsive demonstrativeness of the youthful Jewess, very soon gave her a prominent position in society, and made her fascination felt and talked about. Her first advent and sway prophesied her future renown as the most celebrated woman in Germany who has kept an open drawing-room for the practice of conversation and the joy of intellectual society. It was said of her, at that early period, "She was full of an obliging good temper, that made her anticipate wishes, divine annoyances in order to relieve them, and forget herself in seeking to make others happy."
Her thirtieth year she spent in France, where she had the finest opportunities for studying the famous salon-life of Paris. Without being captivated or at all overborne by it, she no doubt drew many lessons and profited much from it, on carrying her German soul back to her German home. Returning to Berlin, she bewitched all the choice spirits of that city. Married to Varnhagen von Ense, her house was, for a quarter of a century, the rendezvous of whatever was noblest, purest, strongest, most distinguished in Germany. She moved among them as a queen, looked up to by all. She had glowing and sustained friendships, emphatically rich and faithful friendships, of the highest moral order, with Marwitz, Gentz, Prince Louis Ferdinand, Brinckmann, and Veit; besides relations of earnest affection and communion with many other honored contemporaries, such as Schleiermacher, Schlegel, and Jean Paul.
In addition to sketches of her by different hands, we possess five volumes, drawn chiefly from her own pen and edited by her husband, containing records of her thoughts, portraits of her closest friends, and full accounts of her intercourse and correspondence with them. In all this literary transcript, as in the course of experience which it copies, the most conspicuous element is friendship, the reception, reciprocation, culture, and expression of friendship. The king among her friends was her lover and husband, Varnhagen von Ense; her union with whom was not more a marriage of persons, than it was a marriage of minds, souls, interior lives, and social interests and ends. It is principally through him, next after her own writings, that welearn the characteristics of Rahel, which made such deep impressions on people, and held them so fast to her. He thus describes her, as she first dawned on him amidst the highest society of Berlin: "There appeared a light, graceful figure, of small stature, but strong make, with delicate and full limbs, feet and hands remarkably small; the countenance, encircled with rich, dark locks, spoke intellectual superiority; the quick, and yet firm, deep glances left the observer in doubt whether they gave or received more; an expression of suffering lent a soft grace to the clear features. She moved in a dark dress, light almost as a shadow, but also with freedom and sureness; her greeting was as easy as it was kindly. But what struck me most was the sonorous and mellow voice which seemed to swell from the inmost depths of the soul, and a conversation the most extraordinary that I had ever met with. She threw out, in the most facile and unpretending fashion, thoughts full of originality and humor, where wit was united with simplicity, and acuteness with amiability; and into the whole a deep truth was cast, as it were out of iron, giving to every sentence a completeness of impression which rendered it hard for the strongest, in any way, to break or rend it. In her presence, I had the conviction that a genuine human being stood before me, in its most pure and perfect type; through her whole frame, and in all her motions, nature and intellect in fresh, breezy reciprocity; organic shape, elastic fibre, living connection with every thing around; the greatest originality and simplicity in perception and utterance; the combined imposingness of innocence and wisdom; in word and deed, alertness, dexterity, precision; and all imbosomed in an atmosphere of the purest goodness and benevolence; all guided by an energetic sense of duty, and heightened by a noble self-forgetfullness in the presence of the joys and griefs of others."
Such is a glimpse of the Rahel, who, for thirty years, exemplified in her drawing-room, amidst the joy and admiration of the most glorious circle of her countrymen, that rich, strong, free, and noble ideal of womanhood, which Herder, Schiller, Richter, and Goethe, illustrated in so many of their works. So many contrasted qualities met and were reconciled in her, that different friends and critics report her in quite different likenesses. According to one, she never thought pronouncedly, but gave forth the exquisite perfume of thought: her life was made of tears, smiles, dreams, fantasies, flutterings of wings, too celestial for the gross air of earth. According to another, she was too recklessly thorough, and used too shattering an emphasis. In fact, both these sides were true. Gentz, the celebrated politician, called her "a great man," and confessed himself to be, in comparison, a woman. Yet no one who knew her could deny that she strikingly possessed the best traits of her sex, purity, tenderness, modesty, patience, and self-sacrifice. In 1813, during the horrors of disease in Berlin, and the horrors of war in Prague, she gave herself up with joy to nursing the sick and the wounded. "The feast of doing good," she called it. "Never have I seen elsewhere," said Varnhagen, "such a mass of masculine breadth and penetration, alongside of which, however, swelled, without remission, the warm flow of womanly mildness and beauty. Never have I seen an eye and a mouth animated with such loveliness, and yet, at times, giving vent to such outbreaks of enthusiasm and indignation."
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."
In his high estimate of her talent, he tried to persuade her to undertake a literary work, the translation and illustration of Petrarch, which she actually began, but left unfinished.
"Your province, like my own," he writes, "is the interior of the sentiments; but, believe me, you have at command the genius of music, of flowers, of brooding meditation, and of elegance. Privileged creature, assume a little confidence, lift your charming head, and fear not to try your hand on the golden lyre of the poets. It is my mission to see that some trace of your noble existence remains on this earth. Help me to fulfil my mission. I regard it as a blessing that you will be loved and appreciated when you are no more. It would be a real misfortune if so excellent a being should pass merely as a charming shadow. Of what use is memory, if it does not perpetuate the beautiful and good?"
This league of lofty friendship, of endearing intercourse and service, held good while a whole generation of mortals came upon the stage and disappeared; and it throve with growing validity in the latest old age of the fortunate parties. Ballanche believed, after the death of his mother, that he saw her, several successive mornings, enter his room, and ask him how he had passed the night. This ocular illusion affords us an affecting glimpse of his heart. He wrote to his friend, "Antiquity confides its weariness and grief to us, without doubt, to beguile us from our own." "Had Orpheus never met Eurydice, his existence would have remained incomplete; and, in place of the cruel grief of her loss, he would have known another grief not less intense, solitude of soul." "I am alone, and the solitude weighs heavily upon me. Permit me to solace myself by talking a moment with you." "I protest to you in all sincerity, that my one absorbing thought is my warm feeling of friendship for you. I have need to be assured by you, and that as often as possible, that this sentiment shall not end in unhappiness for me. The thought of that is an agony which terrifies me. You are so kind, you have so much sympathy for all unhappy persons, that I fear it is through pity and condescension that you show kindness to me." This expression was in the year 1816; but all such uneasiness soon vanished, and he learned to rely on her sincere cordiality with a serene assurance, which was the richest luxury of his life.
In 1830, Ballanche, publishing his chief work, the "Palingénésie Sociale," dedicated it to Madame Récamier, in a form whose delicacy and fervor made it one of the most exquisite pieces of praise ever paid in letters. Alluding to Canova's portrait of Madame Récamier, in the character of the celestial guide of Dante, he says, "An artist enveloped in a grand renown, a sculptor who has just shed so much glory on the illustrious land of Dante, and whose graceful imagination the masterpieces of antiquity have so often exalted, one day, for the first time, saw a woman who seemed to him a living apparition of Beatrice. Full of that religious emotion which is the gift of genius, he immediately commanded the marble, always obedient to his chisel, to express the sudden inspiration of the moment; and the Beatrice of Dante passed from the vague region of poetry into the domain of substantial art. The sentiment which dwells in this harmonious countenance, now become a new type of pure and virgin beauty, in its turn inspires artists and poets. This woman, whose name I would here conceal, whom I would veil even as Dante does, is endowed with all the generous sympathies of our age. She has visited, with the select few, the haunts of lofty minds. Here, in this seat of imperturbable peace, of unalterable security, she has formed noble friendships, those friendships which have filled her life, which, born under immortal auspices, are sheltered alike from time, from death, and from all human vicissitudes. I address myself, then, to her who has been seen as a living apparition of Beatrice. Can she encourage me with her smile, with that serious smile of love and of grace, which expresses at once confidence and pity for the pains of probation, for the burdens of an exile that should end, sweet and calm augury, wherein is revealed, even in the present, the certainty of our infinite hopes, the grandeur of our definitive destinies?"
When the good Ballanche was taken dangerously ill, Madame Récamier had just undergone an operation for cataract, and was under strict orders from the physician not to leave her couch. But, on the announcement of the condition of Ballanche, she immediately rose, and went to his bedside, and watched by him until his last breath. In the anxiety and tears of this experience, she lost all hope of recovering her sight. Her incomparable friend received the supreme hospitality at her hands, and was buried in her family tomb, leaving, in his works, a delightful picture of his mind; in his life, a perfect model of devotion. The removal of this soul, echo of her own; this heart, wholly filled by her; this mind, so gladly submissive to her influence, could not but leave a mighty void behind. For, notwithstanding the wondrous array of gifts, attractions, and attentions lavished on her, her deep sensibility and interior loneliness made her often unhappy. She would sit by herself, in the twilight, playing from memory choice pieces of the great masters of music, the tears rolling down her cheeks. Friendship was more than a delight: it was a necessity to her.
De Tocqueville pronounced an exquisite eulogy by the grave of Ballanche, in the name of the Academy. La Prade, in the funeral address he delivered at Lyons, the birthplace of the deceased, said, "There was in his mind, in its serenity, its charming simplicity, its tenderness, something more than is found in the wisest and the best. His virtue was of a divine nature: it was at once a prolonged innocence and an acquired wisdom. Serene and radiant as his soul may now be in the mansions of peace, we can hardly conceive of it as more loving and more pure than we beheld it on this earth of infirmity and of strife." What a delight it is to contemplate the relation that bound two such spirits together, the measureless treasures of inspiration, solace, joy, it must have yielded to them both I Sarah Austin, who was in Paris at the time Ballanche died, and an intimate of the illustrious circle of friends, says, "I shall never forget the sort of consternation, mingled with sorrow, which this death caused. Everybody felt regret for so pure and excellent a man, but yet more of grief and pity for Madame Récamier, whose loss was felt to be overwhelming, and entirely irreparable." Ampere says, in his cordial and glowing memoir of Ballanche, "While he was composing his 'Antigone,' Poetry appeared to him under an enchanting form. He became acquainted with her, of whom he said that the charm of her presence laid his sorrows to sleep; who, after being the soul of his most elevated and delicate inspirations, became in later years the providence of every moment of his life." Ballanche himself often assured Madame Récamier, that the ideal of the "Antigone" of his dreams was revealed to him by her, and that, in drawing this perfect portrait, he had copied largely from her. "It was only through Eurydice," he writes, "that Orpheus had any mission for his brother- men. If my name survives me, as appears more and more probable, I shall be called the Philosopher of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, and my philosophy will be considered as inspired by you. This thought is my joy. I am now entering on the last stage of my life: however prolonged this stage may be, I know well what is at the end of it. I shall fall asleep in the bosom of a great hope, full of confidence that your memory and mine will live the same life." Fortunate friends! happy in their living union immaculate as heaven, happy in the grateful admiration and love of all fit souls who shall ever read of them!
And if he grieved because his words, his name,The breath of after-ages will not stir,'Tis but because he would impart his fame,And share an immortality with her;So might there, from the brightest, holiest flameThat ere did martyrdom of heart confer,Two shadowy forms of Truth and Friendship rise,To seek their home together in the skies.
Pervading and earnest, however, as were these attachments of Madame Récamier to Montmorency and Ballanche, the crowning passion of her life was her friendship for Chateaubriand. This grand writer and imposing person has described his first meeting with her:
"I was one morning with Madame de Staël, who, at toilet in the hands of her maid, twirled a green twig in her fingers while she talked. Suddenly Madame Récamier entered, clothed in white. She sits down on a blue-silk sofa. Madame de Staël, standing, continues her eloquent conversation. I scarcely reply, my eyes riveted on Madame Récamier. I had never seen any one equal to her, and was more than ever depressed. My admiration of her changed into dissatisfaction with myself. She went out, and I saw her no more for twelve years. Twelve years! What hostile power squanders thus our days, ironically lavishing them on the indifferences called attachments, on the wretchednesses named felicities!"
But it was in 1817, at a private dinner in the chamber of the dying Madame de Staël, that their real acquaintance began. The literary fame of Chateaubriand was then greater than that of any living man. He was a lofty, romantic, melancholy person, with a superb head and face, polished manners, and a grand vein of eloquence. Nothing was so deeply characteristic of Madame Récamier as her enthusiasm for brilliant minds, noble sentiment and conduct. It was this that had so fascinated her with Madame de Staël. The sure proof of the ideal nature of her attachments, their freedom from sensual ingredients, is this ruling stamp of reverence and loyalty. Those whom she admired the most enthusiastically she loved the most passionately. It was inevitable that her imagination would be captivated with the chivalrous and imposing Chateaubriand, especially at such an affecting time. "He seemed the natural heir to Madame de Staël's place in her heart." Speaking of this overwhelming sentiment, thirty years later, she said, "It is impossible for a head to be more completely turned than mine was: I used to cry all day." Montmorency and Ballanche were greatly distressed, and not a little mortified and jealous. It was not that they had fallen into a lower and narrower place in her affection, but that they saw Chateaubriand installed in a higher and larger place. They feared that her peace would be wrecked in wretchedness by an intimate connection with one so discontented and capricious, a sort of spoilt idol, a hero of ennui, filled with causeless melancholy, voracious of praise, querulous, exacting, his own imperious and inevitable personality ever uppermost. In vain they sought to warn and dissuade her from the new attachment. Montmorency seems to have fancied that the passion was not friendship, but love; and faithfully, with solemn energy, he adjured her, by all the sanctions of religion, to guard herself. He soon learned his error, and gracefully apologized: "When I read your perfect letter, lovely friend, remorse seized me, and now fills my soul. I am deeply touched by the proofs of your friendship, and by the triumphs of your reason. I am, for friendship's sake, proud of the exclusive privilege you accord to me of admission and consolation, and impatiently long to go and exercise the sweet right. Pardon me my letter of this morning. Adieu. Persist in your generous resolutions, and turn to Him who alone can strengthen them and reward them."
The friendship of Madame Récamier and Chateaubriand became more absorbing and complete, and was destined to endure with their lives. "It was," Madame Lenormant says, "the one aim of her life to appease the irritability, soothe the susceptibilities, and remove the annoyances of this noble, generous, but selfish nature, spoiled by too much adulation." Her steady moderation, moral wisdom, beautiful repose, and sweet oblivion of self, were an admirable antidote to his extreme moods, uneasy vanity, and morbid depression. Communion with her serene equity, her matchless beauty, her inexhaustible tenderness, the experience of her constant homage, soothed his haughty and mordant, but magnanimous and affectionate, nature, and were an infinite luxury to him. An admiring recognition is almost a necessity for those highly endowed with genius. And Madame Récamier's intense faculty of admiration, with her self-forgetting devotedness, exactly fitted her for this ministry. Chateaubriand became the first object of her life. Modifying her habits to suit his tastes, she made him, instead of herself, the centre around which every thing was to revolve. She devised endless means of lending an interest to his existence. She listened to every thing he wrote. She drew into her parlor, to meet him, all those persons who could interest or amuse him, or in any way give him pleasure. She diverted attentions from herself to him with exhaustless skill and generosity. In a poem which he addressed to her, he called her the "soft star that guided his path."
Such jealousy as can find a place in natures so noble is easily to be traced in the letters of Ballanche and Montmorency. Chateaubriand calls Ballanche "the hierophant" or "the mysterious initiator," "the man the most advanced at the Abbaye-aux-Bois." Ballanche, in turn, calls Chateaubriand "the king of intelligence." But Madame Récamier's wonderful sweetness and discretion invariably restored the interrupted harmony. Nor, indeed, did she allow the superior attraction to cast her old friends in the shade. Several years after the death of Montmorency, which happened in church on a Good Friday, Chateaubriand wrote to her thus: "Yesterday I believed myself dying, as your best friend did. Then you would have found one resemblance at least between us, and perhaps you would have joined us in your heart." Five years after their first meeting, Chateaubriand, then ambassador at Berlin, writes to her, "That I shall see you in a month, seems a kind of dream to me." Twenty-five years later, two years before his death, he writes to her at a watering-place whither she had gone for her health, "Do not hasten back. I pass my time here in Notre Dame. It is well occupied; for I think only of you and of God." The persistence of an affection so profound and so pure as that of Madame Récamier bore its proper fruit, and ended by subduing Chateaubriand. Gratitude, respect, veneration, struck their roots to the very bottom of his heart. Little by little, his self-occupied personality yields, and at last he writes to her, "You have transformed my nature." When she was alarmingly ill, in the winter of 1837, he, together with Ballanche, might be seen, in the cold mornings, "his beautiful white hair blown about by the wind, his physiognomy the image of despair," in the court of the Abbaye-aux- Bois, waiting for the doctor to come out. He then writes, "I bring this note to your door. I was so terrified yesterday at not being admitted, that I believed you were going from me. Ah! remember it is I who am to go before you. Never speak of what I shall do without you. I have not done any thing so evil that I should be left behind you." She recovered, and devoted herself more than ever, if possible, through the years of his mental decay, to alleviate and disguise the sad changes that came over him. Blindness began their separation before death came. Nothing can more emphatically bespeak her divine self-abnegation than the fact, that, for a long time after she had become perfectly blind, a dislike to trouble others with her infirmities led her to conceal the misfortune from her general acquaintance. Her eyes kept their brightness, and her hearing was most acute: she recognized, by the first inflection of the voice, those who drew near. The furniture was carefully arranged, always in the same way, so that she could move about confidently; and many persons, when she spoke of her "poor eyes," never dreamed that she had actually lost her sight.
After the decease of his wife, Chateaubriand besought Madame Récamier to marry him. She refused, on the ground, that, if she resided with him, the variety and pleasure his daily visits brought into the tedium of his existence would be destroyed. "Were we younger," she said, "I would gladly accept the right to consecrate my life to you. Age and blindness give me this right. I know the world will do justice to the purity of our relation. Let us change nothing." During his last sickness, he was as unable to speak as she was to see. She had the fortitude to undergo two operations on her eyes in the hope of looking on him once more; but in vain. By his bedside when he expired, she felt the sources of her life struck. She came from the room with no outward sign of distress, but clothed with a deadly paleness, which from that hour never left her. Her niece wrote, at the time, to a friend in England, "Those who, during the last two years, have seen Madame Récamier, blind, though the sweetness and brilliancy of her eyes remained uninjured, surrounding the illustrious friend, whose age had extinguished his memory, with cares so delicate, so tender, so watchful; who have seen her joy when she helped him to snatch a momentary distraction from the conversation around him, by leading it to subjects connected with that past which still lingered in his memory, those persons will never forget the scene. They could not help being deeply affected with pity and respect at the sight of that noble beauty, brilliancy, and genius bending beneath the weight of age, and sheltered, with such ingenious tenderness, by the sacred friendship of a woman who forgot her own infirmities, in the endeavor to lighten his."
History scarcely affords a finer instance of the ministrations of womanhood to soothe the woes and supply the wants of man than is exhibited in the relation of Madame Récamier and Chateaubriand. His egotistic and restless mental activity; his exaggerated, perturbed, and gnawing self-consciousness; his despairing view of men; his alienation from the spirit of his age, made him most lonely and unhappy. Meanwhile his ardent poetic susceptibility, his soaring imagination, his impassioned tenderness, his knightly sentiments, his religious feeling, pre-eminently fitted him to enjoy the moral homage, the delicate, sympathetic attentions, of a woman crowned with every exalting attribute of her sex. He appreciated the prize at its full worth. When nothing else could any longer interest him, her charm retained its pristine power. When beyond his threescore and ten, he writes to her thus, at different times:
"Other things are old stories: you are all that I love to see." "I am going to walk out with the lark. She shall sing to me of you: then she will be silent for ever in the furrow into which she drops." "I have only one hope graven on my heart, and that is, to see you again." "Cherish faithfully your attachment to me: it is all my life. You see how my poor hand trembles; but my heart is firm." "I have but one thought, fidelity to you: all the rest is gone."
For many years, even after his noble faculties were broken, and he had lost the use of his limbs, so that he was forced to be carried into her room, he passed the hours of every day, from three to six, with her. Amidst the ordinary hatreds, miseries, and indifferences of society, is it not indeed instructive and refreshing to see this example of a spotless friendship still yielding, in extreme old age, the interest, the solace, the happiness, which every thing else had ceased to yield?
Chateaubriand devotes to Madame Récamier the eighth volume of his "Memoires d'Outre Tombe." He recognizes, in her serious friendship, a support for the weariness of his life, a remuneration for all his sufferings.
"It seems, in nearing the close of my existence, as if every thing that has been dear to me has been dear to me in Madame Récamier, and that she was the concealed source of my affections. All my memories, both of my dreams and of my realities, have been kneaded into a mixture of charms and sweet pains, of which she has become the visible form. In the midst of these Memoirs,' the temple I am eagerly building, she will meet the chapel which I dedicate to her. Perhaps it will please her to repose there. There I have placed her image." During the few months that she survived their loss, Madame Récamier often spoke of Chateaubriand and Ballanche together. Repeatedly, if the door chanced to open at the hour when these two friends had been accustomed to enter, she started; and, on being asked the reason, replied that at certain moments her thought of them was so vivid, that it amounted to an apparition. Only three days previous to her death, she received M. de Saint Priest, and took great interest in hearing him read the eulogy on Ballanche which he was about to pronounce before the Academy.
Besides these three chief friends, Madame Récamier had many others well deserving of separate mention. Paul David, nephew of her husband, was a most devoted and inseparable companion of her whole life. When she lost her sight, he used to read to her every evening. He was a poor reader; and, perceiving that she was sensitive to this defect, he secretly took lessons, at the age of sixty-four, to improve his elocution. Junot and Bernadotte were her ardent, lasting friends, and always delighted to serve her. Her rare graces, and her generous goodness to Madame Desbordes-Valmore, disarmed the prejudices and won the heart of the gifted but misanthropic Latouche. The Duke de Noailles, who, under the envelope of a chill manner, concealed a conscientiousness of judgment, a constancy and delicacy of feeling, in strong sympathy with her own nature, was admitted to the rank and title of friend, "a serious thing," says her biographer, "for her who, more than any one in the world, inspired and practised friendship in the most perfect sense of the word." He held a place in her esteem like that held by Matthieu de Montmorency. One of the latest and warmest of her friends was the brilliant and high-souled Ampere, introduced to her by Ballanche, who had been an intimate friend of his father, and who now loved the son with double fervor, a debt which the grateful young man repaid with interest in a noble tribute to his memory. Never did a mother feel a deeper solicitude in the prospects of a darling son, or exert herself more devotedly to further his success; never did a son more thoroughly idolize a beautiful and good mother, than was realized between Madame Récamier and Ampere. Solely to please her, this most entertaining and most courted man in Paris devoted himself not merely to her, which would have been easy; but to Chateaubriand, which was difficult. Nothing can better illustrate her irresistible charm. And nothing can better illustrate the coarseness and ignorance of many of our critics, than the presumption with which one of them, in 1864, speaking of Ampere's funeral, says, "He was one of Madame Récamier's many lovers, and was bitterly disappointed at her refusal to marry him after the death of Chateaubriand!"
Such were the few principal men who penetrated to the centre of that select circle, in whose outer ranges of general benevolence the right of citizenship was granted to so many choice figures. Among the more distinguished of these latter may be named Benjamin Constant, the Duke de Doudeauville, De Gerando, Prosper de Barante, Delacroix, Gerard, Thierry, Ville-main, Lamartine, Guizot, De Tocqueville, Sainte Beuve. Surrounded by such persons as these, in the humble chamber to which, on the loss of her fortune, she had betaken herself, she presided like a priestess in the temple of friendship, ever pre-occupied with them, their glory her dominant passion, never herself seeking to shine, but intent only to elicit and display their gifts. Was it not natural, that they should, in the humorous phrase of Ballanche, "gravitate towards the centre of the Abbaye-aux-Bois"?
Elizabeth Barrett Barrett allows us a few glimpses into two friendships, which, to a nature like hers, we cannot but think must have been nobly precious. One, celebrated in her poem of "Cyprus Wine," was with Hugh Stuart Boyd, who amused himself during some weary periods in his blindness with the grateful occupation of teaching her to read Greek. The other was with her cousin, John Kenyon, author of "A Rhymed Plea for Tolerance," to whom she so expressively inscribes the most elaborate work of her life, "Aurora Leigh."
It is difficult to find any more remarkable example of the inspiration, the balm, and the joy a great man may derive from the pure friendship of an appreciative woman than that which is furnished in the relation between Auguste Comte and Madame Clotilde de Vaux. In his "Catechism of Positive Religion," and in the preface and dedication of the first volume of his "System of Positive Politics," he has given quite a full account of this friendship, of its circumstances and its effects. Comte was a man of an extraordinary original genius; of profound effusiveness; but excessively proud, and sensitive to affronts. Full of noble thoughts and sentiments, heroically devoted to the pursuit of truth and the good of his race, his outward life was unfortunate. He was poor and lonely. He had many severe quarrels, disappointments, and vexations. No one appreciated him with admiring love. His wife was utterly unsuited to his tastes, and finally deserted him. Meantime he toiled, with a martyr-like pertinacity, at his great task of philosophical construction. Believing his work destined to be of incalculable service to mankind, he rewarded himself, for his vast achievements and his unmerited sufferings, with an exceptional valuation and esteem of himself.
Just at this time, sad, weary, solitary, and teeming with suppressed tenderness, he met with Madame Clotilde de Vaux, a young woman of a fine feminine genius and character, made virtually a widow by the crime and imprisonment of her unworthy husband. She seems at once to have fully appreciated the best side of the genius of Comte, entered into his disinterested sentiments, pitied his misfortunes, and ministered to his highest wants like an angel. As his disciple and friend, she lavished on him an enthusiastic admiration and affection. She reflected him, in her esteem and treatment, at a height, and in a glory, harmonizing with his own estimation of his mission. It was a celestial luxury; and it wrought miracles in him. He was transformed into apparently another person. His scientific and philosophical career became a poetic and religious one. He reproduced the most glowing and delicate emotions of Dante and Petrarch and Thomas a Kempis. The relation between Comte and Madame de Vaux was one of absolute blamelessness and purity. For one year only was he allowed to enjoy this divine delight. He was about to adopt her legally as his daughter, when she died, leaving him inconsolable, save for the melancholy satisfaction of beatifying her memory with his pen, and of worshipping her in his heart.
"An unalterable purity," he says, "confirmed her tenderness, and was the cause of a moral resurrection to me during the incomparable year of our external union. My present adoration of her is more assiduous and profound, but less vivid, than when she was alive. It daily makes me feel the truth of a sentence which once dropped from her pen: There is nothing in life irrevocable, except death.'"
The deep and stern solitude of Comte, the wearisome toils he underwent, the austere pre-occupations of his mind, the harassments and lacerations he had known, seemed to make him doubly susceptible to the action of the sympathetic instincts, to those pleasures of praise and tenderness which aggrandize and sweeten our existence, and constitute our keenest happiness. No one was purer than he in his life; no one severer in his condemnation of every form of corrupt indulgence. Therefore, no one has had a higher idea of the value of feminine friendship, and no one been more loyal to it in his own experience. It is truly touching to read, in the light of his life and character, what he has written on this topic. The three guardian angels, for devout and effusive communion with whom he set apart a sacred period every day, were, Rosalie Boyer, Clotilde de Vaux, and Sophie Eliot, his mother, his friend, and his servant. By prayer and meditation on these three beloved memories, he cultivated the three chief sympathies, veneration for superiors, attachment to equals, goodness to inferiors. He expresses the deepest gratitude for the privilege of that friendship, "the tardy felicity reserved for a solitary life, devoted, from the first, to the fundamental service of humanity." Even its removal by death, he said, did not restore his former isolation; for the inward treasure of affection it had bestowed, constantly contemplated afresh in memory, remained the permanent and principal resource of his life. "She has, now for more than six years since her death, been associated with all my thoughts, and with all my feelings."
The injustice of the popular view of Comte's character, in its deepest truth, as hard, coarse, despotic, is shown by his favorite aphorisms. "Live for others." "Disinterested love is the supreme good of man." "Love cannot be deep, unless it is also pure." "The one thing essential to happiness is, that the heart shall be always nobly occupied." It is probable that Comte exaggerated the worth of his friend, when he ascribed to her "a marvellous combination of tenderness and nobleness, never, perhaps, realized in another heart in an equal degree;" but he did not exaggerate the blessed comfort which her friendship was to him, or the power with which it wrought in his soul. That she was a very superior nature, appears clearly from the few expressions of her mind which are preserved to us. For example, she says, "No one knows better than myself how weak our nature is, unless it has some lofty aim beyond the reach of passion." And again she says, "Our race is one which must have duties, in order to form its feelings."
In speaking thus of Auguste Comte, I am not ignorant of his foibles of character, the morbid side of his ill-balanced mind and heart. But the unquestionable greatness and nobleness of the man are so much superior to his weaknesses, and are so much less appreciated by the public, that I can treat his memory only with reverence, willingly leaving to others the ungrateful task of ridiculing or scorning him. He had, no doubt, an exaggerated pride and vanity. But he labored for truth and his fellow-men with transcendent fidelity. His irascible egotism made him suffer its own punishment. His lot was lonely and was painful. The solace of the stainless friendship which Madame Clotilde de Vaux brought him appeals to my most respectful sympathy. And it has a lesson which many of those who sneer would be benefited by appropriating. Let us leave the history with the breathing words of Comte himself:
"Adieu, my unchangeable companion! Adieu, my holy Clotilde, who art to me at once wife, sister, and daughter! Adieu, my dear pupil, and my fit colleague. Thy celestial inspiration will dominate the remainder of my life, public as well as private, and preside over my progress towards perfection, purifying my sentiments, ennobling my thoughts, and elevating my conduct. Perhaps, as the principal reward of the grand tasks yet left for me to complete under thy powerful invocation, I shall inseparably write thy name with my own, in the latest remembrances of a grateful humanity."
When Paul, the Czar of Russia, espoused the Princess Marie de Wurtemburg, Sophie Soymonof, then in her sixteenth year, and distinguished for her accomplishments, was chosen maid of honor to the new empress. Marie was endowed with rare beauty, and surrounded by seductions and difficulties; but she set such an example of amiable and solid virtue in her lofty place, that calumny never assailed her.
A strong affection, based on mutual esteem and tenderness, sprang up between the empress and her maid. This affection was never interrupted nor chilled. The fury and puerility, the monstrous pride and jealousy, of Paul, made him constantly quarrel with those who were brought into close relations with him. The empress alone triumphed over his outbursts, by dint of unfailing sweetness, modesty, and patience. She smilingly submitted to the capricious exactions, distasteful exercises, and excessive fatigues he imposed. However bitter her sufferings, the serenity of her soul was never visibly altered. But, in sympathizing with the hardships of her kind mistress, Sophie early learned to penetrate the secret of noisy pomp and hidden woes, glittering prosperity and silent tears.
Secretary Soymonof, aware of the precarious tenure by which the dependents of the court held their prosperity, was anxious to secure for his daughter a trustworthy protector, and a handsome position in the future. He cast his eyes on his personal friend, General Swetchine, a man of an imposing aspect, a firm character, a just and calm spirit, who had had an honorable career, and was held in high consideration. Sophie accepted, with her usual deference to her father's wishes, the husband thus chosen, although he was twenty-five years older than herself. It cost her many a secret pang; for she was already in love with a young man of noble birth and fortune, with rare qualities of mind and a brilliant destiny. She knew that her affection was reciprocated. But, from a sense of filial duty, she silently renounced him; and, when he in turn resigned himself to another marriage, she became the warm and steadfast friend of his wife. This painful renunciation, in the introspective reflection, and the dissolution of romantic dreams to which it led, was the first of those earthly disenchantments, which, shattering and darkening the empire of social ambition, transferred her interest from material pleasures and hopes to the imperturbable satisfactions of religion.
The second blow quickly followed. Only a few days after that marriage which her father thought promised so much security and consolation to his old age, the Emperor Paul, in a cruel whim, suddenly banished him from Petersburg. Retiring to Moscow, the galling sense of his disgrace, the separation from his darling daughter, together with a frigid reception by a friend on whom he had especially relied, plunged him into the deepest grief. A terrible attack of apoplexy swept him away. At the dire announcement, Madame Swetchine sunk on her knees; and, in the spiritual solitude, unable any more to lean on her father, turned with irrepressible need and effusion to God.
General Swetchine was made military commandant and governor of St. Petersburg. At the head of a splendid establishment, his young wife found herself in the highest circle of the most brilliant society in Europe; for at that time the Revolution had banished the noblest families of France, and their headquarters were in the Russian capital. Madame Swetchine always possessed, in remarkable union, an earnest desire for action and companionship, and a strong taste for solitude and meditation. She managed her life so skilfully, that both these inclinations were largely gratified. With many of the most high-toned and accomplished persons whom she met, both of the Russian nobility and the French emigrants, she formed earnest and lasting relations of mind and heart. The most refined, pronounced, and impressive characters in St. Petersburg, between the years 1800 and 1815, were embraced in her friendships. Her leisure hours were scrupulously and eagerly devoted to self-improvement. She engaged in a wide range of literary, historic, and philosophical studies; making copious extracts from the books she read, patiently reflecting on the subjects, and setting down independent comments. The progress she made was rapid, and soon rendered her a notable woman.
Paul, full of lugubrious visions and suspicions, one day disgraced General Swetchine by removing him from office. But this official dismission did not entail banishment, and was followed by no loss of social caste. The general and his exemplary wife continued to live amidst their numerous friends as happily as before. The interchange of literary and philosophic ideas shared the hours in their attractive parlor with the revolutionary and reactionary politics of the time. The profound attachments, stamped with reverence and the rarest truthfullness, which in those years united many admirable persons with Madame Swetchine, were frequently reporting themselves, under far other circumstances, in a distant land, half a century later.
In 1833, the celebrated Count Joseph de Maistre was accredited from France to the Russian court. He was then about fifty, a man of pure life, rare genius, and fervent enthusiasm; familiar with the world, with the human heart, and with the loftiest ranges of sentiment and learning. His zeal for the Catholic Church was extreme. Madame Swetchine, at this time, without being at all a devotee, was a sincere member of the Greek Church. She was already familiar with the great minds of all ages and lands; and, at this particular period, was earnestly studying modern philosophical controversies, comparing the ideas of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel with those of Descartes, Pascal, and Leibnitz. Despite the difference in their points of view, and the many other contrasts between them, these two remarkable persons the thoroughly trained master, in whom the gifts of knowledge, eloquence, faith, and finesse, were accumulated; and the meditative, earnest, consecrated young woman of twenty-one had no sooner met than they felt the parity and harmony of their souls. They formed an exalted friendship, full of solace and happiness to them both, a friendship charged with the most important results on the destiny of the woman, since it led to her conversion from the Greek Church to the Catholic, and gave a deep religious inspiration and stamp to her entire subsequent life. Such minds have a thousand lofty topics of common interest to talk of; and they frequently visited each other, exchanging thoughts with ever-deepening confidence and esteem. "The cold countenance of the Count de Maistre," Madame Swetchine writes to her dearest female friend, "conceals a soul of profound sensibility. Without praising me, he often says pleasing things to me." At another time, she humorously writes to the same friend: "The Princess Alexis and I have been to spend an evening at the house of the Count de Maistre. From deference to the duties of hospitality, he would not suffer himself a single moment of sleep. He rose with the palm of victory out of this terrible struggle of nature and politeness; but who can tell at what a cost?" She said that great griefs had purified his ambition, and lent a strange interest to him, elevating and aggrandizing his character. He set an extreme value on her friendship; and wrote to her, that he should never spare any pains to preserve in its integrity what he felt was an infinite honor to him. He wrote to his friend, the Viscount de Bonald, that he had never seen so much moral strength, talent, and culture, joined with so much sweetness of disposition, as in Madame Swetchine. On their separation, by a residence in different countries, De Maistre gave her a magnificent portrait of himself, on the frame of which he had written four verses, adjuring the happy image, in answer to the call of awaiting friendship, to fly, and take its place where the original would so gladly be. This portrait she kept prominently hung in her parlor as long as she lived. In one of his letters to her, he writes: "My thought will always go out to seek you: my heart will always feel the worth of yours." The memory of this first great friend continued to hover over her life to the end. In her last days, generously offended by what she thought the unjust strokes in the portraiture of De Maistre, presented by Lamartine in his "Confidences," she took up her pen in refutation, and wielded it with telling effect. This eloquent vindication of her old friend, when he had been dead nearly forty years, was one of her latest acts, and truly characteristic of her tenacious fidelity of affection.
The enthusiasm shown by the Count de Maistre for the Roman Catholic Church awakened a deep interest in Madame Swetchine. This interest was greatly enhanced by the admirable examples of piety and charity set before her in the lives of several of the French exiles in St. Petersburg, with whom she had contracted friendships. Especially was she impressed and attracted by the amiable virtues of the Princess de Tarente, the devout elevation of her character, and the triumphant sanctity of her death. Madame Swetchine at length resolved to make a deliberate examination of the claims of the Roman Church, and to come to a settled conclusion. Providing herself with an appropriate library, acompanied only by her adopted daughter Nadine, in the summer of 1815, she withdrew to a lonely and picturesque estate, situated on the borders of the Gulf of Finland. Here, through the days and nights of six months, she plunged into the most laborious researches, historical and argumentative. The result was, that she became convinced of the apostolic authority of the Roman primacy, and avowed herself a Catholic. Soon after this conversion, the Jesuits were ordered to leave Russia. Indignant at an order which she regarded as unjust, she openly identified herself with the cause of these proscribed missionaries. The machinations of the political enemies of General Swetchine had made his situation disagreeable to him; and, when he saw those enemies gaining credit, his pride took offence, and he determined to leave the country. Madame Swetchine's passion for travel and observation combined with her new religious faith to make this removal less unwelcome than it would otherwise have been.
The close of the year 1816 found her established in Paris, where, with the exceptions of a year in Russia, and a couple of years in Italy, she was to reside until her death. The Bourbon nobility, now recalled to France, and reinstated in power, repaid the generous kindness she had shown them in St. Petersburg, by giving her a hearty welcome, and lavishing attentions and affection on her. Her deep interest in charitable institutions soon brought her into intimate and most cordial relations with De Gerando. Baron Humboldt and the Count Pozzo di Borgo, among the earliest to become her friends, were assiduous visitors at her house; and, in the salon of the brilliant Duchess de Duras, where she was quickly appreciated and made to feel at home, she became acquainted with the most interesting and commanding minds of France at that time, such as Chateaubriand, Remusat, Cuvier, Montmorency, Villemain, Barante. These persons have all testified, in turn, to the great impression her character made on them.
Madame Swetchine formed with a large number of men of rare excellence and accomplishments ardent and lasting attachments, which were the greatest comfort to herself, and administered invaluable inspiration and happiness to them. Among these, particular mention should be made of her confessor, the pious and venerable Abbé Desjardins; her brother-in-law, Father Gargarin; Moreau; Turquety; Montalembert; and, at a later date, De Tocqueville, who writes to her, "The friendship of such as you are, imposes obligations." Another expression of De Tocqueville must not be omitted here: "Let me thank you for your last letter. It contained, as all your letters do, proofs of an affection which consoles and strengthens me. I never received a line of your writing without being sensible of this twofold impression. The reason is, I think, that one finds in you a heart easily moved, in connection with a mind firmly fixed upon abiding principles. Here is the secret of your charm and your sway. I want to profit more than do by your precious friendship. It distresses me that I succeed so ill." She was one of those few natures able to forget themselves, take an enthusiastic interest in others, and devote unwearied pains to further their interests, sympathize and aid in their pursuits, calm, refine, enrich, and bless their souls. She sustained the ideal standards, and raised the self-respect, of every one who enjoyed the honor of her regard. Accordingly, no noble man could be intimate with her without grateful and affectionate veneration. M. de Maistre said of her, "More loyalty, intellect, and learning were never seen joined to so much goodness." The Viscount de Bonald said, "She is a friend worthy of you; and one of the best heads I have ever met, effect or cause of the most excellent qualities of the heart with which a mortal can be endowed." The poet Turquety sent her an exquisite poem, descriptive of herself and of his feelings towards her. She wrote in reply, "Before thanking you, I have thanked God for giving your heart such an impression of me, unworthy of it as I am. The illusion which arises from affection is another grace, I had almost said another virtue. Your accent has a persuasive sincerity; and faith, when it is vivid, believes in miracles." And then she thus delicately indicates her objection to the publication of the verses: "I condemn this charming flower to enchant only my solitude; but this is the better to gather its fragrance, and it will survive me."
An invaluable friendship also existed between Madame Swetchine and Alexander the Emperor of Russia, one of the most interesting and romantic characters of modern time, of whom she said to Roxandra Stourdza, "Already above other men, by his glory; by the influence of religion, he will be above himself." When the famous mystical Madame de Kriidener appealed to him, in the name of virtue and of religion, to be true to his own better nature, he burst into tears, and hid his face in his hands. As she paused apologetically, he exclaimed, "Speak on, speak on: your voice is music to my soul." She obtained a great influence over him. He had likewise an enthusiastic attachment for Napoleon; and Madame de Kriidener called them respectively the white angel and the black angel. His sensibility to all generous sentiments, all thoughts of poetic height and richness, was extraordinarily tender and expansive. He was often known, in the overwhelming re-action of his emotions, convulsed with tears, to leap into his carriage alone, and drive out into the solitary country or forest. Such were the exalted traits of his character, and his many beautiful deeds, that Madame Swetchine felt her natural relations of duty and submission transmuted into those of vivid admiration and devotion. "I fully sympathize," she writes to her earliest bosom- friend, "with the vivacity of your admiration for our dear Emperor. What a happiness to be able to eulogize with truth! Let us hope we are in the aurora of a most beautiful day for Russia. How pleased I am at having always seen in his soul that which this day shows itself with a glory so fair and so pure! He is a true hero of humanity. He seems in his conduct to realize all my dreams of moral dignity; and I find, at last, in this union of religious sentiments and liberal ideas, the long-sought resemblance of the type I carry in my mind, and which has hitherto been qualified as fantastic, the creation of a too sanguine imagination. In him we see, that, even on the throne, in the wild tumult of all interests, of all passions, one can remain man, Christian, philosopher; pursue the wisest and most generous plans; and carry into his actions every thing that is beautiful, from the highest justice to the most touching modesty."
Alexander testified his respect and regret, when Madame Swetchine departed to reside in Paris, by asking her to be his correspondent. The correspondence was continued until his death, ten years afterwards. The Emperor Nicholas, on his accession, restored to Madame Swetchine all her letters; and she allowed an eminent statesman, in 1845, to read the whole collection. After her death, no trace of it was to be found among her papers. It must possess an intense interest; and it is to be hoped that it still exists, and may yet one day see the light.
Perhaps the most intimate and truly devoted of all the friends of Madame Swetchine was that accomplished member of the French Academy whose biographic and editorial labors have erected such an attractive and perdurable monument to her memory, the Count Alfred de Falloux. The soul of reverence, gratitude, and love exhales in his sentences when he writes of her. After describing what "she was to all who had the inexpressible happiness of knowing her," he acids, "and this she will now be to all who shall read her; and death will but give to her words one consecration more." But the modesty of M. de Falloux has not given the public her letters to him, and has kept his personal relations with her much in the background. We are left to guess the measure and the activity of their friendship, from indirect indications.
On the whole, possibly because of the editor's reticence as to himself, we are left to believe, that the friend who held the pre-eminent place in the heart of Madame Swetchine, during the last twenty-five years of her life, was Father Lacordaire, the illustrious Catholic preacher. A complete picture of this ardent and unfaltering friendship is shown in the letters of the two parties, gathered in an octavo volume of nearly six hundred pages. We know not where, in the annals of human affection, to find the account of a friendship more spotless or more morally satisfying than this. The volume which preserves and exhibits it will be found by all who are duly interested in the psychology and experience of persons so extraordinary, both for their genius in society, and for the quantity and quality of their private experience full of solid instruction and romantic interest. The inner life of Madame Swetchine was a sacred epic: the outer career of Lacordaire, an electrifying drama. This double interest of a private, spiritual ascent, and of a chivalrous gallantry in the thick of battle, is clearly unfolded in the book before us.
The chivalrous young Count de Montalembert was one of the dearest friends of Madame Swetchine. She said that his soul seemed formed under the inspiration of the fine thought of Plato: "The beautiful as a means of reaching the true." Behold, in the following extract from one of the many letters in which she strove to pacify his perturbed spirit, by recalling him from the war of politics, and reconciling his passionate reformatory sentiments with the ruling principles and authorities of the Catholic Church, the tender wisdom and affection with which she speaks: "You seize only on the disinterested and poetic side of these questions, but all the same you are in the battle, giving and taking blows. And thus, with a mind perfectly high-toned and honorable, a crystal which is almost a diamond, with faultless habits, and all the believing and pious sentiments they involve, you have neither the heart's sweet joy nor its sweet peace. The reason why you are so ill at ease, is, that your conscience lies so near your heart that their voices and their troubles are confounded. My dear Charles, will you not reward me by being all that my wishes and my prayers would fain make you? I will not say whether you have the power to rejoice or afflict my heart; but, when you woke in me a mother's emotions, I cannot believe that you condemned me to the sorrow of Rachel."
One day this beloved young man led to the drawing-room of his maternal friend his heart's brother, the eloquent Lacordaire, then in the early renown of his wonderful career of ecclesiastical oratory. Madame Swetchine had already been deeply moved by his preaching, and was desirous of knowing him. She quickly won his confidence, and became, what she ever continued to be, a ministering angel to his spirit. She was much older than he, much more profoundly versed in human nature, much more soberly balanced and calm in soul. With a vigilance, a wisdom, and a tenderness that were unwearied and inexhaustible, she watched his course, studied the wants of his mind and heart, and labored, as need was, alternately to confirm his sinking courage and to soothe his excited imagination. Without being ostensibly such, she was really his spiritual director. "Her subtile and tender spirit," as Dora Greenwell has remarked, "seems to move across his heart, to woo and to caress it to peace and goodness, to call out its deepest concords, as the hand of the skilled musician moves across his instrument, knowing well each fret and chord of the sweet viol he doth love."