othing to ask but sympathy and kindness.

One of the most touching and tender friendships ever recorded was the
intercourse between Chateaubriand and Madame Recamier when they were
both old and infirm. Nothing is more interesting than their letters and
daily interviews at the convent, where she spent her latter days. She
was not only poor, but she had also become blind, and had lost all
relish for fashionable society,--not a religious recluse, saddened and
penitent, like the Duchesse de Longueville in the vale of Chevreuse, but
still a cheerful woman, fond of music, of animated talk, and of the
political news of the day, Chateaubriand was old, disenchanted,
disappointed, melancholy, and full of infirmities. Yet he never failed
in the afternoon to make his appearance at the Abbaye, driven in a
carriage to the threshold of the salon, where he was placed in an
arm-chair and wheeled to a corner of the fireplace, when he poured out
his sorrows and received consolation. Once, on one of those dreary
visits, he asked his friend to marry him,--he being then seventy-nine
and she seventy-one,--and bear his illustrious name. "Why," said she,
"should we marry at our age? 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."

The old statesman and historian soon after died, broken in mind and
body, living long enough to see the fall of Louis Philippe. In losing
this friend of thirty years Madame Recamier felt that the mainspring of
her life was broken. She shed no tears in her silent and submissive
grief, nor did she repel consolation or the society of friends, "but the
sad smile which played on her lips was heart-rending.... While
witnessing the decline of this noble genius, she had struggled, with
singular tenderness, against the terrible effect of years upon him; but
the long struggle had exhausted her own strength, and all motives for
life were gone."

Though now old and blind, yet, like Mme. du Deffand at eighty, Madame
Recamier's attractions never passed away. The great and the
distinguished still visited her, and pronounced her charming to the
last. Her vivacity never deserted her, nor her desire to make every one
happy around her. She was kept interesting to the end by the warmth of
her affections and t