Upon the fall of Napoleon, Mme. Recamier returned to Paris and, her husband’s fortune being restored, gathered about her all the great nobles of the ancient regime.  But fortune was unkind to her husband for the second time, and she withdrew to the Abbaye-au-Bois, where she occupied a small apartment on the third floor.  Here her distinguished friends followed her—­such as Chateaubriand and the Duc de Montmorency.  Between her and the famous author of Le Genie du Christianisme there sprang up a friendship which lasted thirty years.  During this time it is said that he visited her at a certain hour each day, the people in the neighborhood setting their clocks by his appearance.  When he was absent on missions, he wrote her of every act of his life.  Both, weary of the dissipations of society and its flatteries, sought a pure and lofty friendship, spiritual and affectionate, with no improper intimacy.  There was mutual admiration and mutual respect.  Even Chateaubriand’s wife, who was an invalid and with whom he spent every evening, encouraged his friendship with Mme. Recamier.  When, through the fall of Charles X., Chateaubriand lost his power, the friendship did not cease.  M. Turquan insists that he did not really care seriously for Mme. Recamier, that his visits were the outgrowth of mere habit.  But it is to be seen that throughout his book Turquan has little sympathy for his subject, whom he pictures as a beautiful, heartless, intriguing woman with immense hands, flat, square fingers, and large feet.

The influence possessed by Mme. Recamier was most remarkable; for with the new statesmen, Thiers, Guizot, Mignet, De Tocqueville, Sainte-Beuve, as well as the nobles and princes, she was on most cordial terms, and was received in any salon which she chose to visit.  Her unbounded sympathy, tact, and common sense made her friendship and counsel much in demand by great men.  One trait, however, her exclusiveness, caused much discomfort in her life, such as bringing upon her the ill will of Napoleon.

In her later years her physical beauty gradually developed into a moral beauty.  She was never a passionate woman, but rather passively affectionate; purely unselfish, her one desire always was to make people love her and to be happy.  Her friendship with Chateaubriand in the later days was possibly the most ideal and noble in the history of French women.  He never failed to make his appearance in the afternoon at the abbaye, driven in a carriage to her threshold, where he was placed in an armchair and wheeled to a corner by her fireplace.  On one of those visits, he asked her to marry him—­he being seventy-nine, she seventy-one—­and bear his illustrious name.  “Why should we marry at our age?” Mme. Recamier replied.  “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.”  Her charm never deserted her, and she continued to the very last to receive the greatest men and women of the day.  Still the reigning beauty and the queen of French society, she died at the age of seventy-two, of cholera.