Madame Swetchine enjoyed friendships of extraordinary strewth and preciousness with the Countess de Nesselrode, the Princess Galitzin, Madame de Saint Aulaire, the Duchess de Duras, the Marchioness de Lillers, Madame Craven, the Duchess de la Rochefoucauld, and many other women of noble natures and rich interior lives. The record of their intercourse is an imperial banquet for the mind and heart of the reader. The study of it must make ordinary women sigh for envy and shame over their own cold relations, outward ambition, sterile experience, and suspicious caution. Madame Swetchine writes, "I have long made over all my invested capital to the account of those I love: their welfare, their hopes, are the income on which I live." The Duchess de Duras writes to her, "I love you more than I should have believed it ever would be possible for me to love, after what I have experienced. I believe in you, I who have become so suspicious. I rely on you with entire security, whatever happens." Again she writes, when her friend is absent in Russia, "I miss you every moment. Return, return. Your chamber is ready, and that of Nadine. Come, come, dear friend: life is so short, why lose it thus?" Madame Swetchine held such a high place in the esteem of her friends, because she was so serene, so wise, so steadfast, so kind, so pure, that she soothed and strengthened all who came near her. One of her friends expresses this in saying to her, "No society pleases and agrees with me like yours." She always acted on her own aphorism, "To bear faults, to manage egotisms, is an aim perhaps best accomplished by a skilful dissimulation; but the true ideal is to correct faults and to cure self-love."
The best example, in a relation with one of her own sex, of that sentiment of friendship which was such a pervasive need of Madame Swetchine's nature, and which she experienced so profusely, was her connection with Roxandra Stourdza, a Greek maiden of great beauty and genius, born at Constantinople. Originally brought together at court, when the latter was maid of honor to the Empress Elizabeth, they formed an enthusiastic attachment, which, for half a century, largely constituted the richness, consolation, and joy of their lives. The monument of it preserved in their correspondence possesses extreme interest and value, and must secure for it a prominent place among the few historic friendships of women. The oriental Roxandra was the object of an admiration truly romantic from her friend, who seemed always to see her seated on an ideal throne, and to address her as some queen of Trebizond. Saint-Beuve says, the refined and exalted affection between these two young persons, living in the artificial world of the Russian court, and each throwing back, in her own way, the mystic influences derived from the sky of Alexandria, affected him as the exciting perfume exhaled by two rare plants nourished in a hot-house. It is unimaginable what lofty, exquisite, and mysterious sentiments they exchange. Their naked souls and minds, with all their workings, are visible in these ingenuous and crowded letters, as in a glass hive we can study the industry of bees. Saint-Beuve affirms, that the later difference in their religion, the Countess Edling always remaining in the Greek communion, Madame Swetchine becoming a zealous Catholic, finally made ice between them; and that, when the countess came to Paris to visit her old friend, she complained of finding coldness and reserve. Probably there was something in this, but not much. The friendship will be best revealed by citing, from the parties themselves, some of its characteristic expressions.