God,çoisRené by giving me those hours of peace, indemnified me for my hours of trouble; I foresaw the coming rest which my faith believes in and my hope invokes. Agitated as I was elsewhere with political occupations, or disgusted with the ingratitude of Courts, peacefulness of heart awaited me in the recesses of that retreat, like the coolness of the woods when one leaves a scorching plain. I recovered my calm beside a woman who spread serenity around her; and yet that serenity was not in any way too even, for it passed through deep affections. Alas, the men whom I used to meet at Madame Récamier's, Mathieu de Montmorency, Camille Jordan, Benjamin Constant, the Duc de Laval, have gone to join Hingant, Joubert, Fontanes, others who were absent from another absent company. Amid those successive friendships have risen young friends, the vernal offshoots of an old forest in which the felling is everlasting. I beg them, I beg M. Ampère, who will read this when I am gone, I ask them all to keep me in their memory: I make over to them the thread of the life the end of which Lachesis is spinning out on my distaff. My inseparable road-fellow, M. Ballanche, has found himself alone at the commencement and at the end of my career; he has witnessed my friendships broken by time as I have witnessed his carried away by the Rhone: rivers always undermine their banks.
The misfortune of my friends has often weighed heavily on me, and I have never shrunk from the sacred burden: the moment of reward has arrived; a serious attachment deigns to help me to support that which the multitude of the bad days adds to their weight. As I draw near my end, it seems to me that all that has been dear to me has been dear to me in Madame Récamier, and that she was the hidden source of my affections. My memories of diverse ages, those of my dreams as well as those of my realities, have become moulded, blended, confounded into a compound of charms and sweet sufferings of which she has become the visible embodiment She regulates my sentiments, in the same way as Heaven has set happiness, order and peace into my duties.
I have followed the fair wanderer along the path which she has trodden so lightly; soon I shall go before her to a new country. As she passes in the midst of these Memoirs, in the windings of the basilica which I hasten to complete, she may come upon the chapel which here I dedicate to her; it will perhaps please her to rest in it: I have placed her image there.