[Footnote 15: Published in the _Revue des Deux Mondes,_ 1866-67.]
The long friendship which subsisted between this English Protestant lady and Cardinal Consalvi was not the least singular feature in her history. Her intimacy with Adrien and Mathieu de Montmorency was such that they always called her the _duchesse-cousine_, though they were not related to her at all. The Duc de Laval, whom she had known in England, writes thus of her to Madame Récamier, in May, 1823:
"The duchess and I are agreed in admiring you. She possesses some of your qualities, and they have been the cause of her success though life. She is of all women the most attaching. She rules by gentleness, and is always obeyed. What she did in her youth in London, that she now recommences here. She has all Rome at her disposal--ministers, cardinals, painters, sculptors, society, all are at her feet."
Her days, however, were dwindling to a close, as were those also of Cardinal Consalvi. Just seven months after the decease of Pius VII. that eminent statesman followed him to the tomb. All Rome went to see him laid in state--all except Madame Récamier, who, full of the sorrow which the duchess would feel for his loss, and imagining that she would only be pained by such idle curiosity, drove to the solitude of the villa Borghese. On alighting from her carriage, she saw the tall and elegant figure of the duchess in deep mourning, and looking the picture of despair. To her astonishment the latter proposed that they should go and see the lifeless cardinal. It was, indeed, a solemn scene. The chaplains had retired for a brief space to dine, and the public were excluded. The ladies only entered to take their last look of human greatness. There he lay--the steady foe of the French revolution and the imperial despot, the minister of two popes during five-and-thirty years, the able and successful nuncio at the congress of Vienna. There he lay in the sleep of death, with his purple round him, and with his features still beautiful, calm, and severe.
Madame Récamier and her niece fell on their knees, praying fervently for the departed, and still more so for the lonely friend beside them, who had survived all the affections of her youth. She did not long survive. In March, 1824, she expired after a few days' illness. No one had been allowed to approach her till the last moment and for this extraordinary exclusion different reasons are assigned. Madame Récamier and the Duc de Laval believed that it was through fear lest she should declare herself a Catholic. They were admitted just before the vital spark was extinguished, and she died while they knelt beside her, and Madame Récamier held her wan hand, and bathed it with tears. After again visiting Naples, after excursions round the gulf, and reading as she went the glowing descriptions of Chateaubriand and de Staël, while the ardent Ampère and the meditative Ballanche supplied their living comments, Madame Récamier returned to spend her second winter in Rome, and enjoy the society of the Duc de Noailles and Madame Swetchine. The duke was in his twenty-third year, and she used to say that he was the last and youngest of those whom she called her real friends. His subsequent history of Madame de Maintenon proves how just a claim he had to be so regarded.