[1] At the age of fifteen, she was married on 24 April 1793 to Jacques-Rose Récamier (1751–1830), a banker nearly thirty years her senior and a relative of the gourmet Brillat-Savarin.

In relaying the news to a friend of his impending marriage to Juliette, Jacques wrote: I am not in love with her, but I feel for her a genuine and tender attachment which convinces me that this interesting creature will be a partner who will ensure the happiness of my whole life and, judging by my own desire to ensure her happiness, of which I can see she is absolutely convinced, I have no doubt that the benefit will be reciprocal .... She possesses germs of virtue and principle such as are seldom seen so highly developed at so early an age; she is tender-hearted, affectionate, charitable and kind, beloved in her home-circle and by all who know her.

[2] From the earliest days of the French Consulate to almost the end of the July Monarchy, Récamier's salon in Paris was one of the chief resorts of literary and political society that followed what was fashionable.

She persuaded Constant to plead the claims of Murat in a memorandum addressed to the Congress of Vienna, and also induced him to take up a decided attitude in opposition to Napoleon's return during the Hundred Days.

[2] In her later days she lost most of what was left of her fortune; but she continued to receive visitors in her apartment at Abbaye-aux-Bois,[2][10] a 17th-century convent (demolished in 1907) situated at 16 rue de Sèvres in Paris, to which she retired in 1819.

Despite old age, ill-health, partial blindness, and reduced circumstances, Récamier never lost her attractiveness, though at least one man who met her, artist Guillaume Gavarni, opined that she "stank of the lower middle class.

"[11] And although she numbered among her admirers Mathieu de Montmorency, Lucien Bonaparte, Prince Augustus of Prussia (whose marriage proposal she rejected), Pierre-Simon Ballanche, Jean-Jacques Ampère, and Benjamin Constant, none of them obtained over her so great an influence as did Chateaubriand, though she suffered much from his imperious temper.