upon her as an excuse.  The Prince, after waiting in vain, wrote indignantly to Madame de Stael, “I hope I am now cured of a foolish love, which I have nourished for four years.”  But when the news of her exile reached him, he wrote to her expressing his sympathy, but at the same time reproaching her for her breach of faith.  “After four years of absence I hoped to see you again, and this exile seemed to furnish you with a pretext for coming to Switzerland.  But you have cruelly deceived me.  I cannot conceive, if you could not or would not see me, why you did not condescend to tell me so, and I might have been spared a useless journey of three hundred leagues.”

Madame Recamier’s conduct to the Prince, even viewed in the light of her biographer’s representations, is scarcely justifiable.  Madame Moehl attempts to defend her.  She alleges, that, at the time Prince Augustus was paying his addresses to her, he had contracted a left-handed marriage at Berlin.  Even if this story be true, there is no evidence that Madame Recamier was then acquainted with the fact, and if she had been, there was only the more reason for breaking with the Prince at once, instead of keeping him so long alternating between hope and despair.  In speaking of him to Madame Moehl, Madame Recamier said that he was desperately in love, but he was very gallant and had many other fancies.  The impression she made upon him, however, seems to have been lasting.  Three months before his death, in 1845, he wrote to her that the ring she had given him should follow him to the tomb, and her portrait, painted by Gerard, was, at his death, returned to her by his orders.  Either the Prince had two portraits of Madame Recamier, or else Madame Lenormant’s statements are contradictory.  She says that her aunt sent him her portrait soon after her return to Paris, and the date of the Prince’s letter acknowledging the favor confirms this statement.  It is afterward asserted that Madame Recamier gave him her portrait in exchange for one of Madame de Stael, painted by Gerard, as Corinne.

The next important event in Madame Recamier’s life is her exile, caused by a visit she paid Madame de Stael when the surveillance exercised over the latter by the government had become more rigorous.  Montmorency had been already exiled for the same offence.  But, disregarding this warning, Madame Recamier persisted in going to Coppet, and though she only remained one night there, she was exiled forty leagues from Paris.

She bore her exile with dignity.  She would not solicit a recall, and she forbade those of her friends, who, like Junot, were on familiar terms with the Emperor, to mention her name in his presence.  She doubtless felt all its deprivations, even more keenly than Madame de Stael, though she made no complaints.  Her means were narrow, as she does not appear to have been in the full possession of her mother’s fortune until after the Restoration.  She had lived, with scarcely an interruption, a life of society; now she was thrown on her own resources, with little except music to cheer and enliven her.  It was not only the loss of Paris that exiles under the Empire had to endure.  They were subjected to an annoying surveillance by the police, and even the friends who paid them any attention became objects of suspicion.