Abbaye-aux-Bois

The abbey was founded in Ognolles in the Diocese of Noyon by Jean II, Lord of Nesle, in 1202, before his departure for the Fourth Crusade.

For generations it was protected by popes and kings; in the 14th century, a shift in the Hundred Years' War obliged the nuns to relocate.

She first occupied a small, two-room apartment on the fourth floor before moving to a larger first-floor unit (where she could entertain guests) in 1829.

[3] In this larger space, she and François-René de Chateaubriand hosted a salon that became one of the largest in the world of European literature.

Chateaubriand, Récamier's friend and former landlord, described his first visit to her fourth-floor quarters in his autobiography, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe: A dark corridor connected two little rooms; I maintained that this hallway was lit by a gentle light.

The bedroom was furnished with a bookcase, a harp, a piano, a portrait of Madame de Staël, and a view of Coppet by moonlight.

The windows looked out over the Abbaye garden, around the green enclosure of which the nuns made circuits, and in which the schoolgirls ran about.

Madame Récamier would be at the piano; the Angelus would toll; the notes of the bell, which seemed to mourn the dying day: ‘il giorno pianger che si more’, mingled with the final accents of the invocation to the night from Steibelt’s Romeo and Juliet.

In an article he wrote about the abbey's impending destruction, he summarizes its history and reminisces nostalgically about a nun he once heard singing the Kyrie eleison a cappella in the chapel there.

He contrasts the starkness of her lone, echoing voice with the crowds and activity of Paris near the end of the Belle Époque.