Superwomen Part 25

But Jeanne put aside the offer without a tremor of hesitation, turning her back on the wealth and t.i.tle of a princess in order to remain with the bankrupt old commoner whom the world called her husband. For, again, physical reasons intervened.

Lucien Bonaparte, one of the emperor's several brothers, was another ardent wooer. He shone in reflected glory, as his brother's brother, until he seemed quite royal. But to him, as to all the rest, Jeanne--after a wholly harmless and pleasant flirtation--gave a decided refusal.

General Bernadotte, on a foreign mission for the emperor, sought her out. He was a military chief who had fought like a hero and on whom court honors had since fallen thick. He sought, soldier fashion, to carry Jeanne's icy defenses by storm; only to fail as all had failed and to go home grumbling that his majesty had done well to exile so unapproachable a beauty before she had a chance to drive every man in France mad with chagrin.

Benjamin Constant, too--cunning statesman of the old school--loved her. And in his strange, unfathomable mind she found a certain fascination; the more so when she discovered that she could twist that mind to her own purposes. So, instead of dismissing Constant like the rest, she made it clear that she did not love him and then kept him as a friend.

Strong use did she make of that friendship, too, in revenging herself on Napoleon for banishing her. Constant's mighty if tortuous acts of statescraft, just before and just after Napoleon's downfall, have been laid to her influence.

Another exile--General Moreau, Napoleon's oft-time rival in both war and love--now sought to win where his enemy had lost. And he failed.

He was the same General Moreau who a few years earlier had paid court to Betty Jumel and had given her as a love gift a huge gilt-and-prism chandelier which later hung in the Jumel mansion in New York. But he found Jeanne as cold as Betty had been kind, and in time he, too, departed, hopeless.

The next victim was no less a personage than the King of Naples. He was Murat, ex-tavern waiter, peerless cavalry leader, and husband of Napoleon's shrew sister, Caroline Bonaparte. The emperor, after conquering the separate Italian states, had placed his ex-waiter brother-in-law on the Neapolitan throne.

When Jeanne reached Naples, Queen Caroline received her with open arms and invited her to be a guest at the palace. Murat's admiration for the lovely visitor was undisguisable. And--though it has been denied by one biographer that Jeanne was responsible for his treason--almost at once after her arrival, he began to intrigue with Napoleon's enemies. Form your own conclusions, as did folk of the time.

Soon afterward, weakened by the idiotic Russian campaign, Napoleon was set upon by a host of foes. Men who had licked his boots fell over one another to join the alliance against him.

The lion was wounded, and the dog pack was at his throat.

As soon as Napoleon had been hustled off into exile, the Recamiers returned to Paris, as did practically all the army of people he had banished. The banker's fortune was looking up, and they could live in something of their old style there.

Paris, in those first weeks of the "Restoration," was as full of kings, emperors, princes, and dukes as a subway rush-hour train of newspaper readers. One could hardly walk a block without stumbling over a monarch or a commander-in-chief or a princeling.

The heads of the allied armies were still there, strutting gallantly about--they would have run up a tree, two years earlier--and bragging of Napoleon's fall.

There was Alexander, Czar of Russia, gigantic and bearlike, who had once cringed to Napoleon, then frozen and starved him in the Moscow campaign, and now was one of the chiefs of the alliance. There, too, was Blucher, who had tumbled off his horse at Waterloo, but who, none the less, had done more than is placed to his credit to win the victory that forever crushed Napoleon. It was he and his Prussians, not Wellington and the English, who really won Waterloo for the Allies.

Other sovereigns, other generals, there were, too. And, foremost among them, a long, lean Irishman, with a bony face and a great hooked beak of a nose. He was Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, t.i.tular Victor of Waterloo and Man of the Hour.

The Duke of Wellington was not happily married. I think no retroactive libel law can attack me for saying this, for he himself made no secret of it. And he was far from being an exponent to stern British morality.

Indeed, one object of his affections, Miss Jenkins, wrote of him to a friend:

"It was all I could do to prevent His Grace from throwing himself on his knees before me in sinful adulation."

I fear he would have roused cra.s.s horror in the bosom of the mid-Victorian matron who, on seeing Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra," exclaimed:

"How different was Cleopatra's home life from that of our own gracious queen!"

The duke fell victim to Jeanne Recamier's charm. He, the official Man of the Hour, became a fixture at her salons--but for a very brief time. One day, when he was calling on her, a number of other guests being present, the duke made some would-be-witty remark about France.

Jeanne chose to interpret his words as a slur on her beloved country.

Roused for once from her wonted gentleness, she ordered Wellington out of her house.

By the next day all Paris knew that Madame Recamier had shown the omnipotent Duke of Wellington the door. And all Paris--which adored Jeanne and hated the English hero--went wild with delight. Jeanne's popularity from that moment was boundless.

Soon afterward, Wellington found that stern duty called him, somewhat hastily, to London. Whither, to his disgust, the story of his ejectment from Madame Recamier's salon had preceded him.

Canova, the premier sculptor of his day--he who later paid such a.s.siduous court to Elizabeth Paterson--fell in love with Jeanne. So indelibly was her wonder face stamped on his mind that, without her knowing it, he was able to make two busts of her.

When the busts were done, Canova--who was constantly receiving and rejecting offers of fabulous sums to make portrait busts--showed her his labors of love. But Jeanne's beauty went hand in hand with vanity.

She thought the busts over which he had toiled so happily did not do her justice. And without a word she turned away from the inspection and left the studio.

The sharp blow to his pride was too much for Canova. He dropped her acquaintance forever; being perhaps the only one of Jeanne's adorers to break his allegiance to her before she gave the word.

Recamier died. Jeanne, rich and still gloriously beautiful, received shoals of proposals. She rejected them all. She had at last met the love of her life. In the lives of all these super-women, you will have noticed, there was some one man who stood out supreme above all the host of lesser lovers; idolized, placed on a lofty pedestal, a wealth of devotion lavished on him.

And so it was with Jeanne Recamier--although the affair from first to last was starkly platonic. She who had laughed at an emperor, who had rejected a prince's hand, who had turned the most famous man in Europe out of her house, lost her head and her heart to a cranky, bearlike author-adventurer, Francois Auguste de Chateaubriand. Your grandmother read and wept over his American novel, "Atala."

Chateaubriand was a heartbreaker. As a mere youth, his talent for transferring his allegiance with lightning speed from one woman to the next had won for him the sobriquet "~L'Inconstant~." He had traveled in the American wilderness, living among Indian tribes; had hobn.o.bbed with George Washington, to whom he had brought letters of introduction; had been sent fleeing for his life from France during the Terror; had been a favorite of Napoleon's until the Corsican's tyranny disgusted him into turning conspirator.

Of late years he had wandered aimlessly about Europe, making love and earning a scant living as a painter and writer. Sometimes broke, sometimes flush, sometimes acclaimed as a genius, sometimes chased as a political criminal, sometimes in palaces, sometimes in jail--Chateaubriand at length met Jeanne Recamier.

From the first they loved each other. On neither side with it a crazily pa.s.sionate adoration. Rather was it the full, calm devotion of mature hearts that seek safe harbor after many and battering storms.

When Recamier died, Chateaubriand formally asked Jeanne's hand in marriage. She refused--for reasons best known to herself and her physician. But they remained, for all the rest of their lives, faithful and utterly devoted lovers.

Chateaubriand was uncouth, morbid, vain, bristling with a myriad foibles and faults. Jeanne, very gently and tactfully, undertook to cure him of these defects. With tender hands she gradually remolded his wayward, eccentric nature, stripping away much of its dross, bringing out its cleaner, n.o.bler traits.

"You have transformed my character," he wrote her. "I know nothing more beautiful nor more good than you."

When Recamier died, in 1830, Jeanne was a little over fifty.

Chateaubriand was sixty-two. A mature couple, withal. Yet Jeanne looked scarce thirty, and Chateaubriand was still in his late prime.

Again and again he pleaded with Jeanne to marry him. Always she refused, just as she refused a host of others, even in her mature years. Indeed, she received and rejected a proposal of marriage when she was seventy.

The rest of this story is not especially romantic. Perhaps it may not interest you. For it has to do with "the breaking up of things."

The Recamier-Chateaubriand affair went on like an Indian summer, for years. Then, as old age reached out for him, Chateaubriand's eccentricities cropped out afresh. He fell into a melancholy, shut himself away from the world that was at last growing to honor him, became a recluse, and would see no one except Madame Recamier.

His melancholy deepened almost into mania. He had but one dream of life left in his heart--his love for Jeanne. To her he clung like a frightened child to a tender mother.

Then, in its saddest form, old age laid its cold hand across beautiful Jeanne's orange-tinted eyes, and she became totally blind. Even in her blindness she was still lovely, and her soul lost none of its sweetness.

Sightless, she still guarded and sought to amuse the cranky old man she so long had loved; bearing with his once-imperious temper, which had now rotted into mere whining discontent; humoring his million whims; talking softly to him, in his brighter moments, about the gleaming past.

The melancholy old man, lovingly tended and nursed and amused like a baby by the blind old woman who had been the reigning beauty of the world, lingered on for several years longer.

When at last he died, Jeanne mourned him as never had she mourned Recamier or any other. Chateaubriand's death broke her heart. It broke, too, her last tie to earth. And within a few months she followed her lover to the grave.

Thus, at seventy-two, died Jeanne Recamier, virgin heartbreaker, whose very name was for half a century the synonym for absolute beauty and flawless purity. I know of no other super-woman whose character in any way resembles hers.

Which was, perhaps, more unlucky for the other super-woman than for the men who loved them.

CHAPTER XII