eration; 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 Recamier, 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 Recamier, 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 Recamier to
read: he also described to her the refined and magnanimo