It was the friendships of Madame Recamier with distinguished men and women which made her famous more than her graces and beauty.  She soothed, encouraged, and fortified the soul of Chateaubriand in his fits of depression and under political disappointments, always herself cheerful and full of vivacity,—­an angel of consolation and spiritual radiance.  Her beauty at this period was moral rather than physical, since it revealed the virtues of the heart and the quickness of spiritual insight.  In her earlier days—­the object of universal and unbounded admiration, from her unparalleled charms and fascinations—­she may have coquetted more than can be deemed decorous in a lady of fashion; but if so, it was vanity and love of admiration which were the causes.  She never appealed to passion; for, as we have said, her own nature was not passionate.  She was satisfied to be worshipped.  The love of admiration is not often allied with that passion which loses self-control, and buries one in the gulf of mad infatuation.  The mainspring of her early life was to please, and of her later life to make people happy.  A more unselfish woman never lived.  Those beauties who lure to ruin, as did the Sirens, are ever heartless and selfish,—­like Cleopatra and Madame de Pompadour.  There is nothing on this earth more selfish than what foolish and inexperienced people often mistake for love.  There is nothing more radiant and inspiring than the moral beauty of the soul.  The love that this creates is tender, sympathetic, kind, and benevolent.  Nothing could be more unselfish and beautiful than the love with which Madame Recamier inspired Ballanche, who had nothing to give and nothing to ask but sympathy and kindness.

One of the most touching and tender friendships ever recorded was the intercourse between Chateaubriand and Madame Recamier when they were both old and infirm.  Nothing is more interesting than their letters and daily interviews at the convent, where she spent her latter days.  She was not only poor, but she had also become blind, and had lost all relish for fashionable society,—­not a religious recluse, saddened and penitent, like the Duchesse de Longueville in the vale of Chevreuse, but still a cheerful woman, fond of music, of animated talk, and of the political news of the day, Chateaubriand was old, disenchanted, disappointed, melancholy, and full of infirmities.  Yet he never failed in the afternoon to make his appearance at the Abbaye, driven in a carriage to the threshold of the salon, where he was placed in an arm-chair and wheeled to a corner of the fireplace, when he poured out his sorrows and received consolation.  Once, on one of those dreary visits, he asked his friend to marry him,—­he being then seventy-nine and she seventy-one,—­and bear his illustrious name.  “Why,” said she, “should we marry at our age?  There is no impropriety in my taking care of you.  If solitude is painful to you, I am ready to live in the same house with you.  The world will do justice to the purity of our friendship.  Years and blindness give me this right.  Let us change nothing in so perfect an affection.”