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 hobnobbed 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 passionate 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, nobler 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.