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    , 376 MABAME EECAMIER.

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    — : » • ' ¦ I '.' Madame Recamiee's Retu...

    will missing be there you at no Lyons longer . : On such Thursday is your I wish shall . foe Will in you Paris find , and nie you on

    your return ? apparently you do not much care . ... I have written to Lyons and to Turinand again to Lyons . Pray put

    merely to the score of my exactitude , what is prompted foy my regard : it is your habit to foe unjust . "

    It must have been a stange experience to Madame Recamier , who had always inspired as much respect as affection , and had foeen

    invariably treated with chivalrous homage , to read the fretful complaints and incessant reproaches of these letters ; and yet although

    her peace was disturbed by them , her affection was not lessened . One or two letters of Chateaubriand's are specimens of the restand

    , in spite of our having none of Madame Hecamier ' s own letters , we can well guess at their contents by his replies : —

    " 1 am afraid my letter directed to Turin has not reached you because it was not prepaid . I am afraid too that you may

    have passed through Turin and Florence , to which places I also wrote , so quickly that you had not time to ascertain you were

    not forgotten . I hope my first letters will reach you at Rome with this one . Since your departure my work has increasedand in this

    tiresome occupation I have only found a melancholy distraction , from the thought of your absence . I have not been near the Abbaye

    once : I await your return , I am become a coward against grief , I am too old , and have suffered too much ; I make a pitiable struggle

    with sorrow for the few years which remain to me . This wretched fragment of life is hardly worth the trouble I bestow on it . You

    are at Rome—at Rome , which I loved so much , and where I would gladly have passed my life . Should I still be pleased with it ? Tell

    me what have been your feelings ? "What you have felt , I also should have felt . As for youso for me would Rome have lost or

    retained its interest and its charm , . How unfortunate to sympathize so entirely together , and to be separated by 500 leagues .

    " Time goes on , but not fast enough ; I count the days yet to pass as if I were still twenty . When I see the good Due de

    Doudeauville I speak of you directly . He is the only person I see who knows youfor I never meet with Matthieu . I used not to like

    , the duke much , but he speaks of you so well , and with such heartfelt enthusiasm , that you have made me like him .

    "I got your note from Chambery ; it hurt me cruelly , the * Monsieur' ' froze me , you will allow I have not deserved it .

    " Ever yours . _" " ParisJan . 281824 .

    , , " You speak of my triumphs and of my forgetfumess ; believe neither in the one nor in the other . If political success mixed with

    labors which kill me are triumphs , if losing the remainder of life in occupations contrary to _one's tastecan make one forget the

    attachments and the charms of another , kind of existence , at all

    events , it is the fact that neither successes nor occupations have '

    , 376 Mabame Eecamier.

    , 376 MABAME EECAMIER .

• Citation
  • English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), Feb. 1, 1861, page 376, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01021861/page/16/