Twelve years! What adverse power thus cuts and çoisRenéfritters away our days, squandering them ironically on all the indifferences called attachments, on all the miseries styled felicities! Then, by a further derision, when it has blighted and spent the most precious part, it brings you back to the starting-point of your career. And how does it bring you back? With your mind possessed with the foreign ideas, the importunate phantoms, the deluded or incomplete feelings of a world which has left you no happiness. Those ideas, those phantoms, those feelings place themselves between you and the bliss which you might still enjoy. You return with your heart sick with regret, afflicted by those errors of youth so painful to the memory in the modesty of years. That is how I returned, after having been to Rome, to Syria, after seeing an empire go by, after becoming the man of noise, after ceasing to be the man of silence. What had Madame Récamier done? What had been her life?
I have not known the greater portion of the existence at once brilliant and retired of which I am about to talk to you: I am obliged, therefore, to betake myself to authorities other than mine; but they shall be unexceptionable. First, Madame Récamier has described to me facts which she has witnessed and communicated to me valuable letters. She has written, on what she has seen, notes of which she has permitted me to consult the text and, too rarely, to quote it. Next, Madame de Staël in her correspondence, Benjamin Constant in his recollections, some printed, the others in manuscript, M. Ballanche in a notice on our common friend, Madame la Duchesse d'Abrantès in her sketches, Madame de Genlis in hers have furnished abundant materials for my narrative: I have only knotted all these fine names together, filling up the gaps with my own statement, when some links of the chain of events were overlooked or broken.
Montaigne says that men go gaping after future things[338]: I have the passion for gaping after past things. All is pleasure, particularly when we turn our eyes to the early years of those we love; we spin out a cherished life; we extend the affection which we feel over days which we never knew and which we revive; we adorn that which was with that which is; we recompose youthfulness.