s
the wife of the Duc de Duras, she gathered around her a circle of rank,
talent, and distinction. Chateaubriand, Humboldt, Curier, de Montmorency
were among her friends. What treasures of thought and conversation do
these names suggest! What memories of the past, what prophecies for the
future! Mme. de Duras, too, wore gracefully the mantle of authorship
with which she united pleasant household cares. She, too, put something
of the sad experiences of her own life into romances which reflect the
melancholy of this age of restlessness and lost illusions. She, too,
like many of the women of her time whose youth had been blighted by
suffering, passed into an exalted Christian strain. The friend of Mme.
de Stael, the literary CONFIDANTE of Chateaubriand, the woman of many
talents, many virtues, and many sorrows, died with words of faith and
hope and divine consolation on her lips.

The devotion of Mme. de Cantal, the mysticism of Mme. Guyon, find a
nineteenth-century counterpart in the spiritual illumination of Mme.
de Krudener. Passing from a life of luxury and pleasure to a life of
penitence and asceticism, singularly blending worldliness and piety,
opening her salon with prayer, and adding a new sensation to the gay
life of Paris, this adviser of Alexander I, and friend of Benjamin
Constant, who put her best life into the charming romances which ranked
next to "Corinne" and "Delphine" in their time; this beautiful woman,
novelist, prophetess, mystic, illuminee, fanatic, with the passion of
the South and the superstitious vein of the far North, disappeared
from the world she had graced, and gave up her life in an ecstasy of
sacrifice in the wilderness of the Crimea.

It is only to indicate the altered drift of the social life that flowed
in quiet undercurrents during the Empire and came to the surface again
after the Restoration; to trace lightly the slow reaction towards the
finer shades of modern thought and modern morality, that I touch--so
briefly and so inadequately--upon these women who represent the best
side of their age, leaving altogether untouched many of equal gifts and
equal note.

There is one, however, whose salon gathered into itself the last rays
of the old glory, and whose fame as a social leader has eclipsed that of
all her contemporaries. Mme. Recamier, "the last flower of the salons,"
is the woman of the century who has been, perhaps, most admired, most
loved, and most written about. It has been so