The details of that meeting are curious. Being at Lausanne, Benjamin Constant set out to call on Madame de Staël at Coppet. His relatives already knew, and he was interested to make her acquaintance. It happened that he met Madame de Staël on the road, driving from Coppet to Lausanne. He stopped the carriage and introduced himself. She invited him to get in, and drove him back. Finding his company agreeable, she pressed him to stay to supper with her. He did so, and was farther rewarded by an invitation to breakfast with his hostess on the following morning. It was to Madame de Charrière herself that Benjamin Constant first confided the impression that Madame de Staël had made upon him. 'It is the most interesting acquaintance that I have ever made,' he wrote. 'Seldom have I seen such a combination of alluring and dazzling qualities, such brilliance, and such good sense, a friendliness so expansive and so cultivated, such generosity of sentiment, and such gentle courtesy. She is the second woman I have met for whom I could have counted the world well lost--you know who was the first. She is, in fact, a being apart--a superior being, such as one meets but once in a century.' Having read that, Madame de Charrière knew that she had passed for ever out of Benjamin Constant's life. His own writings give us a glimpse of the early days of the new intimacy. Two passages from his diary, the second supplementing the first, supply the picture. Thus we read, on one day: 'I had agreed with Madame de Staël that, in order to avoid compromising her, I should never stay with her later than midnight. Whatever the charm of her conversation, and however passionate my desire for something more than her conversation, I had to submit to this rule. But this evening, the time having passed more quickly than usual, I pulled out my watch to demonstrate that it was not yet time for me to go. But the inexorable minute-hand having deceived me, in a moment of childish anger I flung the instrument of my condemnation on the floor and broke it. "How silly you are!" Madame de Staël exclaimed. But what a smile I perceived shining through her reproaches! Decidedly my broken watch will do me a good turn.' And the next day we find the entry: 'I have not bought myself a new watch. I do not need one any more.'