Henry Dwight Sedgwick - Madame Récamier: The Biography of a Flirt

First published in 1940, this is a biography of Jeanne-Franoise Julie Adlade Rcamier (1777-1849), a French socialite whose salon drew Parisians from the leading literary and political circles of the early 19th century.
Known as Juliette, she was the wife of a Parisian banker 30 years her senior and one of the most prominent women of her time. Beautiful, accomplished, and with a love of literature, Juliette was shy and modest by nature. From the earliest days of the French Consulate to almost the end of the July Monarchy, her salon in Paris was one of the chief resorts of literary and political society that followed what was fashionable. The habitus of her house included many former royalists and others, such as Bernadotte (later Charles XIV of Sweden and Norway) and Gen. Jean Moreau, who were opposed to the government of Napoleon.
In 1805 Napoleons policies caused her husband major financial losses, and in the same year Napoleon ordered her exiled from Paris. She stayed with her good friend Mme de Stal, one of Napoleon Is principal opponents, in Geneva and then went to Rome (1813) and Naples, where she was on exceedingly good terms with Gen. Joachim Murat and his wife Caroline Bonaparte, who were then intriguing with the Bourbons.
Following Napoleons defeat at Waterloo in 1815 she returned to Paris, where despite her reduced circumstances after 1819 she maintained her salon and continued to receive visitors at the LAbbaye-aux-Bois, a 17th-century convent, in which she took a separate suite and to which she retired in 1819.
To be beloved was the history of Mme Rcamier. Beloved by all in her youth, for her astonishing beautybeloved for her gentleness, her inexhaustible kindness, for the charm of a character which was reflected in her sweet facebeloved by young and oldsuch will be the renown of this charming woman!MADAME DE HAUTEFEUILLE