‘Society,’ he continued, ’under the Republic was animated.  We had great interests to discuss, and strong feelings to express, but perhaps the excitement was too great.  People seemed to be almost ashamed to amuse or to be amused when the welfare of France, her glory or her degradation, her freedom or her slavery, were, as the event has proved, at stake.’

‘I suppose,’ I said to Ampere, ’that nothing has ever been better than the salon of Madame Recamier?’

‘We must distinguish,’ said Ampere.  ’As great painters have many manners, so Madame Recamier had many salons.  When I first knew her, in 1820, her habitual dinner-party consisted of her father, her husband, Ballanche, and myself.  Both her father, M. Bernard, and her husband were agreeable men.  Ballanche was charming.’

‘You believe,’ I said, ‘that Bernard was her father?’ ‘Certainly I do,’ he replied.  ’The suspicion that Recamier might be was founded chiefly on the strangeness of their conjugal relations.  To this, I oppose her apparent love for M. Bernard, and I explain Recamier’s conduct by his tastes.  They were coarse, though he was a man of good manners.  He never spent his evenings at home.  He went where he could find more license.

’Perhaps the most agreeable period was at that time of Chateaubriand’s reign when he had ceased to exact a tete-a-tete, and Ballanche and I were admitted at four o’clock.  The most illustrious of the partie carree was Chateaubriand, the most amusing Ballanche.  My merit was that I was the youngest.  Later in the evening Madame Mohl, Miss Clarke as she then was, was a great resource.  She is a charming mixture of French vivacity and English originality, but I think that the French element predominates.  Chateaubriand, always subject to ennui, delighted in her.  He has adopted in his books some of the words which she coined.  Her French is as original as the character of her mind, very good, but more of the last than of the present century.’

‘Was Chateaubriand himself,’ I said, ‘agreeable?’

‘Delightful,’ said Ampere; ’tres-entrain, tres-facile a vivre, beaucoup d’imagination et de connaissances.’

‘Facile a vivre?’ I said.  ’I thought that his vanity had been difficile et exigeante?’

‘As a public man,’ said Ampere, ’yes; and to a certain degree in general society.  But in intimate society, when he was no longer “posing,” he was charming.  The charm, however, was rather intellectual than moral.

’I remember his reading to us a part of his memoirs, in which he describes his early attachment to an English girl, his separation from her, and their meeting many years after when she asked his protection for her son.  Miss Clarke was absorbed by the story.  She wanted to know what became of the young man, what Chateaubriand had been able to do for him.  Chateaubriand could answer only in generals:  that he had done all that he could, that he had spoken