been verified; and, her personal fascination remaining always great, she now acquired an enormous influence. Her extreme self-abnegation and boundless charities increased her reputation for sanctity, and she even succeeded in bringing down on herself a satisfactory amount of persecution. In Paris superstition was, as always, rife. The days were not yet so remote when Philip Egalité had gone to question the devil in the quarries of Montrouge; and men were barely more than middle-aged who in their first youth had looked on the brazen brow of Cagliostro, and felt their blood agreeably frozen by the Comte de St. Germain's casual mention of personal experiences three hundred years old. But little more that thirty years previously to Madame de Krüdener's "revival" Mesmer had seen numbers of the fairest and many not of the stupidest heads in Paris gathered round his famous baquet. A little later the illuminati had been credited unveraciously and to their scant honour, with a share in the sanguinary priesthood of Robespierre, and finally Mademoiselle Lenormand had shuffled the cards of prophecy at the instance of Napoleon himself. Into this strange world, so exhausted and cynical, yet excited, impulsive, and thirsting for novel emotions, the Northern Sybil, with her strange, pale face and shining eyes, came like a wandering star.
But all this was subsequent to our first meeting with her at Coppet, when she was still fairly young, and singularly pretty, and the gold in her tresses owed as yet no fancied splendour to the aureole of inspiration.
Madame Récamier, the charming Juliette, was a far more normal, but a not less attractive person. Châteaubriand's memoirs have made her famous, but
