Superwomen Part 24

Let me touch, as briefly as I can, on a story at which Madame Lenormand, her own cousin, broadly hints and which Turquan openly declares true. Says the former, among other and closer comments on the theme:

"Madame Recamier received from her husband but his name. His affection was paternal. He treated as a daughter the woman who carried his name."

Says Turquan:

"She was Recamier's daughter."

And so, by all testimony, she was. Years before, Recamier had had a love affair with Madame Bernard; an affair that the stupid Bernard had condoned, if he had known of its existence. Nor, said gossip of the day, was it Madame Bernard's sole indiscretion.

Jeanne had been born. From her earliest babyhood, Recamier had all but worshiped her. Not a day had pa.s.sed but he had come to see her. He had loaded her with toys, jewelry, candy. He had been her fairy G.o.dfather.

She had grown up calling him "Daddy Recamier."

Then came the Reign of Terror. Old Bernard's life was in considerable danger. In fact he used to go to the guillotine daily to watch executions, "that he might become used to his fate." Madame Bernard was no fit guardian for a young and incredibly lovely girl in the rotten Paris of that day.

So Recamier, rich and powerful, chose the surest means to safeguard the daughter who was all the world to him. He went through a meaningless "civil ceremony" with her; and installed her, with a retinue of servants, in one-half of his big house. Then and thereafter she was Madame Recamier in name alone; Recamier tenderly watching over her, giving her every luxury money could buy, and observing with a total absence of jealousy her innumerable conquests.

These conquests had begun, by the way, even before Jeanne's early marriage. When she was but thirteen, a young man named Humblot had fallen madly in love with her. To keep Jeanne from reciprocating his flame, she had been packed off to a convent school.

Shortly after the marriage, the Reign of Terror simmered down to the more peaceful if more corrupt Directory. Society rea.s.sembled on its peak, after the years of guillotine-aided cla.s.s leveling. And, in this heterogeneous society, Jeanne blazed forth as a star. Says Sainte-Beuve:

"The world Madame Recamier traversed at this period was very mixed and very ardent."

To its adoration the girl bride lent an amused but wholly impersonal ear. Vaguely she used to wonder why men wept at her feet and poured forth their souls in noisy love for her. Their antics found no response in her own untouched heart. Yet she found them interesting, and therefore in a demure way she encouraged them. Not that such encouragement was really needed.

Presently, out of the chaos of social and political conditions, arose Napoleon Bonaparte. Yes, I know he appears unduly often in this series. But he appeared unduly often in the lives of a score of super-women--Madame Jumel, Elizabeth Paterson, Madamoiselle Georges, Countess Potocka, and the rest--and his name is more often seen in all history, written since 1790, than that of any other man. So be patient if he crops up oftener than the balance of power seems to call for.

Napoleon, first as dictator and then as emperor, ruled France. As a young man, he had been too poor and too busy to glance at any woman.

Now in his days of power and--for him--leisure, he amply made up for such early defects. And presently his alternately pale and jet-black eyes fell upon Jeanne Recamier. Forthwith, he began to make right ardent love to her.

Napoleon, once and only once in all his strange career, had actually lost his level head through love and had been carried by it out of his cool, calculating self. That was when, as a lean, half-starved, hectic young officer of artillery, he had met Josephine Beauharnais.

She was a Creole widow, much older than he. Much slush has been written of her and her wrongs. History, from every source, tells another story.

Napoleon used to meet Josephine at the house of the director, Barras, where she held a somewhat equivocal position. Barras had begun to tire of her. Her teeth were bad; she was beginning to wrinkle and grow sallow; she was silly; she had absolutely nothing in common with the late Mrs. Caesar.

To Napoleon, though, she was as a third-rate show to a country boy who had never before visited the theatre. She was divine. Barras saw; and he also saw a chance to rid himself of a burden and at the same time to attach to himself a growingly useful friend.

Barras persuaded Josephine to marry Napoleon--whom she did not even pretend to love--by saying that the young man had a great future.

Then, as a wedding present, he gave Napoleon command of the ragged, mutinous Army of Italy.

Napoleon, after turning that army into such a fighting machine as the world had never before known, thrashed Italy and Austria and came home the hero and idol of the hour--to find, beyond all doubt or hope, that Josephine was unfaithful to him! He ordered her out of his house. She wept. Her family wept. Every one wept. Every one pleaded. Napoleon shrugged his shoulders and let her stay. But ever thereafter he treated her with mere friendly tolerance. His love for her was stone-dead. And he amused himself wherever amus.e.m.e.nt could be found.

Also, when it suited his turn in after years he calmly divorced her.

"Lefebvre," said Napoleon, in Egypt, "what is Josephine doing at this moment?"

"Weeping for your return," promptly babbled the future Duke of Dantzig.

"Lefebvre," soulfully returned Napoleon, "you're a fool or a liar! Or both. She is riding a white horse in the Bois, in the worst kind of company she can find at such short notice."

Men of rank and wit were choking Madame Recamier's salon to overflowing. She was the inaccessible goal of a hundred Don Juans'

ambitions. Grandees of the old and the new regime as well--aristocrats of the n.o.blesse--who would not deign to visit the Tuileries while the Corsican adventurer held sway in that house of kings--all flocked to the Recamier home and vied with one another to do Jeanne honor.

Her beauty, her siren charm, her snowy--or frosty--virtue were the talk of France. What more natural than that Napoleon should seek out this new paragon; that sheer conceit as well as genuine love should make him burn to succeed where all the world had failed?

Other women--women whose houses he could not have entered, seven years earlier, save as a dependent--were making fools of themselves over the Man of Destiny. He had but to throw the handkerchief for a hundred frail beauties to scramble for its possession. Irresistible, perfect in power and in the serene knowledge of that power, he deigned to make lazy love to Jeanne Recamier.

She was not used to lazy love-making. She did not understand it, but took it for a mere new mannerism of the hypermanneristic emperor. Her seeming indifference had the same effect on Napoleon as might a war campaign that promised grave obstacles. It turned his idle fancy to keen pursuit. Madame Recamier failed to be impressed. Napoleon, thinking he must be mistaken in the idea that any living woman could fail to be dazzled by his attentions, made his meaning quite clear.

Only to meet with a very good-humored but extremely definite rebuff from his charmer.

It was past his understanding. He stooped to bribes; offering to put a big share of the state finances through the Recamier bank, and, with much pomp and ceremony, announcing the appointment of Madame Recamier as one of the Empress Josephine's ladies in waiting.

This was a master stroke--a ~tour de force~--a knock-out--anything you will. For, fat and curved-nosed bankers throughout the empire were yelping for slices of the state finances. And the post of lady in waiting was one for which nearly any woman of the court would gladly have parted with all she no longer possessed.

Then came a shock; a rough, jarring shock; a shock worthy to be administered by, instead of to, the Corsican himself. Madame Recamier coldly refused the glittering offers; declined to be a lady in waiting; and gave Napoleon to understand, in terms he could not mistake, that she wanted nothing from him except unadulterated absence.

It was probably the emperor's one heart rebuff.

In a burst of babyish fury, he--the ruler of France and the arbiter of Europe's fate--crawled so low as to seek revenge on a harmless woman.

He first wrecked the Recamier bank, driving old Recamier to the verge of ruin. Then he trumped up an asinine charge of treason or ~les majeste~ or something equally absurd, against Jeanne. And on the strength of it, he banished her from Paris.

It was a revenge well worthy the eccentric who could rule or ruin half of Europe by a single convolution of his demiG.o.d brain; or could screech in impotent fury at a valet for getting the wrong part in his thin hair.

From Paris went the Recamiers; the banker seeking gently to console his unhappy wife for the ruin she had so innocently wrought; and to build up for her, bit by bit, a new fortune to replace the lost one.

Never by word or look did he blame her. And speedily he ama.s.sed enough money to supply her again with the luxuries she loved.

To Lyons, the old home of both of them, they went; thence to Rome, and then to Naples. In Italy, Jeanne met once more her dearest woman friend; a ludicrously homely woman with the temper of a wet cat and a tongue sharp enough to shave with; a complete foil, mentally and facially, for her bosom friend, Jeanne.

This miracle of homeliness was Madame de Stael, author and futile conspirator. For exercising the latter accomplishment, she had been banished, like Jeanne, from Paris. So ugly was Madame de Stael that when she once said to an ill-favored man:

"You abuse the masculine prerogative of homeliness," her hearers laughed--at her, not at her victim.

In Italy, too, Jeanne met Prince Augustus of Prussia, prince-royal and man of distinction and wealth. They met at a reception. Madame Recamier and Madame de Stael were seated side by side on a sofa. After the introductions, Prince Augustus seated himself between them, remarking airily:

"I find myself placed between Wit and Beauty."

"And possessing neither," commented Madame de Stael, with her wonted courtesy.

The prince, from that inauspicious start, became the infatuated slave of Madame Recamier. He worshiped the ground she trod. He made no secret of his devotion.

In those days the t.i.tle of prince-royal carried real weight, and the gulf between prince and commoner was well-nigh unbridgeable. Love made Prince Augustus waive all this disparity. The fact that Madame Recamier was a mere commoner grew to mean nothing to him. At the risk of disgrace at home and of possible loss of rank and fortune, the prince entreated Jeanne to divorce Recamier and to marry his royal-blooded self.

It was a brilliant offer, one that ninety-nine commoners out of a hundred would have seized with alacrity; for it was not a morgantic union he proposed--he wanted to make Jeanne his princess.

The prince went to Recamier and frankly stated his wishes. To his amaze, instead of challenging the wooer, Recamier at once agreed to let Jeanne get the divorce, on any grounds she chose--or an annulment of their marriage, which would have been still simpler--and marry Prince Augustus.

Always impersonal and adoring in his att.i.tude toward Jeanne, Recamier now urged her to secure her own best interests by giving him up and becoming the prince's wife; a sacrifice far easier to understand in a father than in a husband.