At Lyons,çoisRené I have seen the Jardin des Plantes laid down on the ruins of the ancient amphitheatre and in the gardens of the old Abbaye de la Déserte, now pulled down; the Rhone and the Saône flow at its feet; far away rises the highest mountain in Europe, the first mile-post of Italy, with its white board above the clouds. Madame Récamier was placed in this abbey; she there passed her childhood behind a grill which opened upon the outer church only at the elevation of the Mass. Then one saw young girls bowing down in the inner chapel of the convent. The saint's-day of the abbess was the principal festival of the community; the prettiest boarder paid the customary compliment: her dress was arranged, her hair plaited, her head veiled and crowned by the hands of her playmates; and all this in silence, for the hour of rising was one of those which were called "grand silence" in the monasteries. It goes without saying that Juliette[339] had the honours of the day. Her father and mother, having settled in Paris, sent to fetch their child. From some rough drafts written by Madame Récamier, I gather this note:
"On the eve of the day on which my aunt was to come to fetch me, I was taken to the room of Madame the Abbess to receive her blessing. The next day, bathed in tears, I went out through the door, which I did not remember seeing opened to admit me, found myself in a carriage with my aunt, and we drove off for Paris.
"I leave with regret a time so calm and so pure to enter upon that of excitement. It often comes back to me as in a vague, sweet dream, with its clouds of incense, its numberless ceremonies, its processions in the gardens, its singing and its flowers."
Those hours which have left a pious desert now rest in another religious solitude, without having lost anything of their freshness and their harmony.
Benjamin Constant, the wittiest man after Voltaire, strives to give an idea of Madame Récamier's early youth: he has drawn from the model whose features he aimed at tracing a grace which was not natural to him.
"Among the women of our time," he says, "whom advantages of feature, mind, or character have rendered famous, there is one whom I wish to depict. Her beauty made her admired at first; her soul next made itself known, and her soul appeared even superior to her beauty. The habit of society supplied her mind with the means to display itself, and her mind remained below neither her beauty nor her soul.