excited the displeasure of Madame Recamier’s warm personal friends.  One of them, Madame Moehl, by birth an Englishwoman, undertook her defence.  This lady corrects a few slight inaccuracies of the “Souvenirs,” and since she cannot controvert its more important facts, she attempts to explain them.  Her sketch[A] of Madame Recamier is pleasant, from its personal recollections, but far inferior to one by Sainte-Beuve,[B] which is eminently significant.  Neither, as sources of information, can supply the place of the more voluminous and explicit “Souvenirs.”  It is a little singular that this work has not been translated into English, for, in spite of its lack of method, its diffuseness and disproportionate developments, it is very attractive and interesting.  It is also highly valuable for its large collection of letters from distinguished people.  In the sketch we propose to make of Madame Recamier’s life, we shall rely mainly upon it for our facts, giving in connection our own view of her character and career.

The beauty which first won celebrity for Madame Recamier was hers by inheritance.  Her father was a remarkably handsome man, but a person of narrow capacity, who owed his advancement in life solely to the exertions of his more capable wife.  Madame Bernard was a beautiful blonde.  She was lively and spirituelle, coquettish and designing.  Through her influence with Calonne, minister under Louis XVI., Monsieur Bernard was made Receveur des Finances.  Upon this appointment, in 1784, they came to Paris, leaving their only child, Juliette, then seven years old, at Lyons, in the care of an aunt, though she was soon afterward placed in a convent, where she remained three years.  Monsieur and Madame Bernard’s style of living in Paris was both elegant and generous.  Their house became the resort of the Lyonnese, and also of literary men,—­the latter being especially courted by Madame Bernard.  But, though seemingly given up to a life of gayety and pleasure, she did not neglect her own interests.  Her cleverness was of the Becky-Sharp order.  She knew how to turn the admiration she excited to her own advantage.  Having a faculty for business, she engaged in successful speculations and amassed a fortune, which she carried safely through the Reign of Terror.  This is the more remarkable as Monsieur Bernard was a known Royalist.  He and his family and his wife’s friends escaped not only death, but also persecution; and Madame Lenormant attributes this rare good-fortune to the agency of the infamous Barrere.  Barrere’s cruelty was equalled only by his profligacy, his cunning by his selfishness.  Macaulay said of him, that “he approached nearer than any person mentioned in history or fiction, whether man or devil, to the idea of consummate and total depravity”; and everybody must remember the famous comparison by which he illustrated Barrere’s faculty of lying.  But even taking a much milder view of Barrere’s character, it is a matter