the spots where Madame de Staël had played the piano, had talked to those gathered round her, or had written.
The two friends went into the park where the autumn leaves already were reddening and falling. The wind subsided by degrees, and the sound of a millstream alone broke the stillness. Madame Récamier entered the wood in whose depths the grave is hidden, while Châteaubriand remained looking at the snowy line of the Alps, and at the glittering lake. Above the sombre heights of Jura the sky was covered with golden clouds "like a glory spreading above a bier." Suddenly Madame Récamier, pale and tearful, phantom-like among phantoms, emerged from the wood. And on her companion's melancholy spirit fell a sense of all the emptiness of glory, of all the sad reality of life. "Qu'est-ce que la gloire?" asked Madame de Staël. "Ce n'est qu'un deuil éclatant du bonheur." We could wish that the most famous of women might have held a less hopeless creed.
