But her beauty alone could hardly have contributed to the marvellous success of Mme. Recamier, as some critics assert.  Guizot, for instance, suspects her nature to have been less superficial than other writers might lead one to suppose.  He said:  “This passionate admiration, this constant affection, this insatiable taste for society and conversation, won her a wide friendship.  All who approached and knew her—­foreigners and Frenchmen, princes and the middle classes, saints and worldlings, philosophers and artists, adversaries as well as partisans—­all she inspired with the ideas and causes she espoused.”  Her qualities outside of her beauty were tact, generosity, and elevation of soul, combined with an amiable grace which was unlimited, however superficial it may have been.  Knowing how to maintain, in her salon, harmony and even cordial relations 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 between the elite minds and their diverse sentiments, which she tactfully tempered.  Though ever faithful to one cause, she admitted men and women of all parties to her salon.  She 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.  To these qualities, as much as to her beauty, were due the harmony of her life, the unity of her character—­which were never troubled by the turmoils of politics or the emotions of love.  She was not wife, mother, or lover; “she never belonged to anyone in soul or sense.”  Always mistress of her imagination as well as of her heart, she permitted herself to be charmed but never carried away—­receiving from all, but giving nothing in return.  Her life was brilliant, but there was lurking in the background the demon of sadness and lassitude and the terrible disease of the eighteenth century,—­ennui.

Two splendid portraits of Mme. Recamier are left to us:  one by her passionate but unsuccessful lover, Benjamin Constant, picturing her as the personification of attractiveness; the other by M. Lenormant, showing that she desired constant admiration:  “She lacked the affections which bring veritable happiness and the true dignity of woman.  Her barren heart, desirous of tenderness and devotion, sought recompense for this need of living, in the homage of passionate admiration, the language of which pleases the ears.”  Mme. Recamier, while still a child, seemed to realize the power of her beauty, and even before her marriage in 1793 she would often say, when demanded in marriage:  “Mon Dieu! how beautiful I must be already!” A mere girl when married, being only sixteen years of age, she felt no love for her husband, who was her senior by twenty-five years.