Nevertheless, during the winter of 1816-17, and when she returned to Paris, her spirit showed no sign of failing. In her salon gathered Châteaubriand, Talleyrand, Wellington, Humboldt, Blucher, Lafayette, Schlegel and his brother, Canova, and crowds of English. Bonstetten averred that to her influence over Wellington alone was due the fact that the Army of Occupation was about this time diminished by 30,000 men. Just before her death she removed from the Rue Royale to the Rue Neuve des Mathurins; and it was here that Châteaubriand again, after so many years, saw Madame Récamier, and commenced the romantic friendship which was to end only with his death. He had been invited to dine at Madame de Staël’s; but, when he arrived there, found that she was too ill to entertain the guests. The dinner took place all the same—for Madame de Staël invariably insisted on this, and made her daughter do the honors. They must have been melancholy banquets; the little Duchess de Broglie presiding with a heavy heart, and all the guests being vividly conscious of the noble life slowly and painfully ebbing away in another room. It is with a certain relief, therefore, in the midst of so much sadness that one reads Châteaubriand’s record of his meeting with Juliette. He was selfish and self-conscious and weak no doubt—his fretful uneasy vanity, indeed, pierces through the affected melancholy of the _Mémoires d’Outre Tombe_. They are sickly with a kind of faded perfume; and yet in the great void which is coming, one is glad to think that the blind Madame Récamier, the aged and feeble Châteaubriand, must often have remembered, perchance often talked of, that dinner where they met in the house of their dying friend.