When Captain Roger was set at liberty,çoisRené he hastened to express his gratitude to his benefactress. One evening, after dinner, I was at Madame Récamier's as usual; suddenly appeared this officer. He said to us, in a southern accent:
"But for your intercession, my head would have rolled on the scaffold."
We were stupefied, for we had forgotten our merits; he shouted, red as a turkey-cock:
"You don't remember?... You don't remember?..." In vain we made a thousand excuses for our lack of memory; he went off, striking the spurs of his boots together again and again, as furious at our forgetting our good action as though he had had to reproach us with his death.
About this time, Talma asked Madame Récamier to allow him to meet me at her rooms in order to consult me on some verses in Ducis' _Othello_, which he was not allowed to speak as they stood. Leaving my dispatches, I hastened to keep the appointment; I spent the evening with the modern Roscius recasting the unlucky lines. He proposed an alteration to me, I proposed another to him; we vied with each other in rhyming; we withdrew to the window-recess or to a corner to turn and re-turn a hemistich. We had much difficulty in agreeing as to the sense and the rhythm. It would have been rather curious to see me, the minister of Louis XVIII., and Talma, the king of the stage, forgetting what we might be, emulating each other in enthusiasm, and sending the censorship and all the grandeurs of the world to the deuce. But, if Richelieu had his dramas performed while letting Gustavus Adolphus[491] loose on Europe, could not I, a humble secretary of State, busy myself with the tragedies of others while seeking the independence of France in Madrid?
Madame la Duchesse d'Abrantès, whose coffin I have saluted in the church at Chaillot, has described only the _inhabited_ abode of Madame Récamier; I will tell of the _solitary_ refuge. A dark corridor separated two small rooms. I maintained that this vestibule was lit up with a gentle light. The bed-room was furnished with a library, a harp, a piano, a portrait of Madame de Staël and a view of Coppet by moonlight; pots of flowers adorned the window-sills. When, quite breathless with clambering up three flights of stairs, I entered the cell at the fall of evening, I was enraptured. The outlook from the windows was over the garden of the Abbaye, in the green clumps of which the nuns moved to and fro and school-girls ran hither and thither. The top of an acacia-tree rose to the level of the eye. Sharp-pointed steeples pierced the sky, and on the horizon appeared the hills of Sèvres. The expiring sun gilded the picture and entered through the open windows. Madame Récamier sat at her piano; the Angelus tolled: the sound of the bell which seemed "to weep the dying day, _pianger il giorno che si muore_[492]," mingled with the last accents of the Invocation of the Night in Steibelt's[493] _Romeo and Juliet._ A few birds came to nestle in the raised outer blinds; I joined the silence and solitude from afar, above the noise and tumult of a great city.