In those days the title 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 attitude 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. But Jeanne put aside the offer without a tremor of hesitation, turning her back on the wealth and title 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.