It was not her own countrymen alone who raved about her beauty. The sober-minded English people were quite as much impressed. When she visited England during the short peace of Amiens, she created intense excitement. The journals recorded her movements, and on one occasion in Kensington Gardens the crowd was so great that she narrowly escaped being crushed. At the Opera she was obliged to steal away early to avoid a similar annoyance, and then barely succeeded in reaching her carriage. Chateaubriand tells us that her portrait, engraved by Bartolozzi, and spread throughout England, was carried thence to the isles of Greece. Ballanche, remarking on this circumstance, said that it was "beauty returning to the land of its birth." Years after, when the allied sovereigns were in Paris, and Madame Recamier thirty-eight years old, the effect of her beauty was just as striking. Madame de Kruedener, celebrated for her mysticism and the power she exerted over the Emperor Alexander, then held nightly reunions, beginning with prayer and ending in a more worldly fashion. Madame Recamier's entrance always caused distraction, and Madame de Kruedener commissioned Benjamin Constant to write and beseech her to be less charming. As this piquant note will lose its flavor by translation, we give it in the original. "Je m'acquitte avec un peu d'embarras d'une commission que Mme. de Kruedener vient de me donner. Elle vous supplie de venir la moins belle que vous pourrez. Elle dit que vous eblouissez tout le monde, et que par la toutes les ames sont troublees, et toutes les attentions impossibles. Vous ne pouvez pas deposer votre charme, mais ne le rehaussez pas." Madame Recamier's personal appearance at eighteen is thus described by her niece:-- "A figure flexible and elegant; neck and shoulders admirably formed and proportioned; a well-poised head; a small, rosy mouth, pearly teeth, charming arms, though a little small, and black hair that curled naturally. A nose delicate and regular, but _bien francais_, and an incomparable brilliancy of complexion. A countenance full of candor, and sometimes beaming with mischief, which the expression of goodness rendered irresistibly lovely. There was a shade of indolence and pride in her gestures, and what Saint Simon said of the Duchess of Burgundy is equally applicable to her: 'Her step was that of a goddess on the clouds.'"