evolve. She devised endless means of lending an interest to his
existence. She listened to every thing he wrote. She drew into her
parlor, to meet him, all those persons who could interest or amuse
him, or in any way give him pleasure. She diverted attentions from
herself to him with exhaustless skill and generosity. In a poem which
he addressed to her, he called her the "soft star that guided his
path."

Such jealousy as can find a place in natures so noble is easily to be
traced in the letters of Ballanche and Montmorency. Chateaubriand
calls Ballanche "the hierophant" or "the mysterious initiator," "the
man the most advanced at the Abbaye-aux-Bois." Ballanche, in turn,
calls Chateaubriand "the king of intelligence." But Madame Recamier's
wonderful sweetness and discretion invariably restored the
interrupted harmony. Nor, indeed, did she allow the superior
attraction to cast her old friends in the shade. Several years after
the death of Montmorency, which happened in church on a Good Friday,
Chateaubriand wrote to her thus: "Yesterday I believed myself dying,
as your best friend did. Then you would have found one resemblance at
least between us, and perhaps you would have joined us in your
heart." Five years after their first meeting, Chateaubriand, then
ambassador at Berlin, writes to her, "That I shall see you in a
month, seems a kind of dream to me." Twenty-five years later, two
years before his death, he writes to her at a watering-place whither
she had gone for her health, "Do not hasten back. I pass my time here
in Notre Dame. It is well occupied; for I think only of you and of
God." The persistence of an affection so profound and so pure as that
of Madame Recamier bore its proper fruit, and ended by subduing
Chateaubriand. Gratitude, respect, veneration, struck their roots to
the very bottom of his heart. Little by little, his self-occupied
personality yields, and at last he writes to her, "You have
transformed my nature." When she was alarmingly ill, in the winter of
1837, he, together with Ballanche, might be seen, in the cold
mornings, "his beautiful white hair blown about by the wind, his
physiognomy the image of despair," in the court of the Abbaye-aux-
Bois, waiting for the doctor to come out. He then writes, "I bring
this note to your door. I was so terrified yesterday at not being
admitted, that I believed you were going from me. Ah! remember it is
I who am to go before you. Never speak of what I shall