In her later years her physical beauty gradually developed into a moral beauty. She was never a passionate woman, but rather passively affectionate; purely unselfish, her one desire always was to make people love her and to be happy. Her friendship with Chateaubriand in the later days was possibly the most ideal and noble in the history of French women. He never failed to make his appearance in the afternoon at the _abbaye_, driven in a carriage to her threshold, where he was placed in an armchair and wheeled to a corner by her fireplace. On one of those visits, he asked her to marry him--he being seventy-nine, she seventy-one--and bear his illustrious name. "Why should we marry at our age?" Mme. Récamier replied. "There is no impropriety in my taking care of you. If solitude is painful to you, I am ready to live in the same house with you. The world will do justice to the purity of our friendship. Years and blindness give me this right. Let us change nothing in so perfect an affection." Her charm never deserted her, and she continued to the very last to receive the greatest men and women of the day. Still the reigning beauty and the queen of French society, she died at the age of seventy-two, of cholera. There is a wide difference between Mme. Récamier and Josephine, the two women of the Napoleonic era who exerted so powerful an influence upon the social and political fortunes of France. At the time of Napoleon's first success, the former was only twenty-one, with Madonna-like charms and attractiveness; the latter, thirty-five, but with exquisite taste in dress and skill in beautifying. Possessed of unstudied natural grace and elegance, and always attired in perfect harmony with her beauty of face and form, she could easily stand a comparison with the other beauties of the day, all of whom studied her air and manner and marked the aristocratic ease and poise of her real _noblesse_ of the old régime. [Illustration 6: _MME. RECAMIER'S SALON After the painting by Adrien Moreau._ _Thus, in Lamartine we find: "The young girl was, they say, a_ sous-entendu _of nature: she could be a wife, she could not be a mother." These are the two mysteries we must respect, but which we must know to have been the secret of the entire life of Mme. Recamier. Knowing how to maintain, in her salon, harmony between men of the most varied temperaments and political ideas, it was possible for her to remain all her life an intelligent and warm-hearted bond. She admitted men and women of both parties to her salon.... was moderate and just in the midst of the most arduous struggles, tolerant toward her adversaries, generous toward the conquered, sympathetic to all, and remarkably successful in conciliating all political, literary, and philosophical opinions as well as the passions which she aroused in her worshippers._]