reatly distressed, and not a little mortified and
jealous. It was not that they had fallen into a lower and narrower
place in her affection, but that they saw Chateaubriand installed in
a higher and larger place. They feared that her peace would be
wrecked in wretchedness by an intimate connection with one so
discontented and capricious, a sort of spoilt idol, a hero of ennui,
filled with causeless melancholy, voracious of praise, querulous,
exacting, his own imperious and inevitable personality ever
uppermost. In vain they sought to warn and dissuade her from the new
attachment. Montmorency seems to have fancied that the passion was
not friendship, but love; and faithfully, with solemn energy, he
adjured her, by all the sanctions of religion, to guard herself. He
soon learned his error, and gracefully apologized: "When I read your
perfect letter, lovely friend, remorse seized me, and now fills my
soul. I am deeply touched by the proofs of your friendship, and by
the triumphs of your reason. I am, for friendship's sake, proud of
the exclusive privilege you accord to me of admission and
consolation, and impatiently long to go and exercise the sweet right.
Pardon me my letter of this morning. Adieu. Persist in your generous
resolutions, and turn to Him who alone can strengthen them and reward
them."

The friendship of Madame Recamier and Chateaubriand became more
absorbing and complete, and was destined to endure with their lives.
"It was," Madame Lenormant says, "the one aim of her life to appease
the irritability, soothe the susceptibilities, and remove the
annoyances of this noble, generous, but selfish nature, spoiled by
too much adulation." Her steady moderation, moral wisdom, beautiful
repose, and sweet oblivion of self, were an admirable antidote to his
extreme moods, uneasy vanity, and morbid depression. Communion with
her serene equity, her matchless beauty, her inexhaustible
tenderness, the experience of her constant homage, soothed his
haughty and mordant, but magnanimous and affectionate, nature, and
were an infinite luxury to him. An admiring recognition is almost a
necessity for those highly endowed with genius. And Madame Recamier's
intense faculty of admiration, with her self-forgetting devotedness,
exactly fitted her for this ministry. Chateaubriand became the first
object of her life. Modifying her habits to suit his tastes, she made
him, instead of herself, the centre around which every thing was to
r