Folk Figure. As hostess of the leading political and literary salon of Paris she had a central view of a series of turbulent events. Daughter of well-off parents, she was raised initially in Lyon before moving to Paris as a teenager; married-off at 15 to Jacques Recamier, a much older and quite wealthy banker who was rumoured to be her biological father and thus desirous of having her inherit his property, Juliette immediately made her home a magnet for the Parisian elite. Blessed with a pleasant disposition, and a personality that allowed her to avoid suspicion as to her loyalty, she was able to recieve individuals from all points of the political compass, including leftover Royalists and other malcontents. Juliette developed a rather complicated friendship with the legendary author Germaine de Stael, and thru her an even more convuluted one with the writer and politician Benjamin Constant, whose world view she was to shape much as Madame de Stael had her own. Eventually running afoul of Napoleon, she was sent into exile, partly over her relationship with Madame de Stael, and perhaps due to her refusal to serve as lady-in-waiting to Empress Josephine. Juliette went first to Lyon, thence to Rome, and finally to Naples, where she befriended the monarchist Joachim Murat and his wife Caroline Bonaparte. She was to influence his thoughts, and later support him during the Hundred Days of 1815, even getting Benjamin Constant to plead his cause to the Congress of Vienna, though by that time both Constant and Madame de Stael were actually, to a degree, favouring Napoleon. During a stay with Madame de Stael in Coppet, Switzerland, Juliette is said to have fallen in love with Prince Augustus of Prussia; a divorce was arranged so that she could marry him, but in the end she refused to desert her husband who had been essentially bankrupted by Napoleon in 1805. Finally able to return to Paris in 1814, she was, by 1819, forced by reduced finances to take an apartment in the old convent of L'Abbaye-aux-Bois where her salon continued much as before. Her charms apparently not diminished by poverty, advancing age, and later near-blindness, she received both old faces, like Constant and Prince Augustus, and new, such as Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, Lucien Bonaparte, and Jean-Jacque Ampere. In her youth, Juliette posed both for the great master Jacques-Louis David and his student Francois Gerard; currently, David's work hangs in The Louvre. After her death from cholera, her letters and writings were collected, and were published in 1859. She has been the subject of several biographies, with H. Noel Williams' "Madame Recamier and Her Friends" (1901) and Edouard Herriot's 1904 two volumes (English translation by Alys Hallard) remaining in print. Today, Juliette lives on as a character in Madame de Stael's "Corinne", in the countless reproductions made of her image, and in the "Recamier", a type of sofa she favoured.