This lady tells how, in the summer of 1828, they used to meet at the Pont d'Austerlitz and dine together in the Jardin des Plantes in a private room. "He ordered champagne, to dispel my coldness, as he said; and then I sang to him Béranger's songs--_Mon âme, La bonne vieille. Le Dieu des bonnes gens_, &c. He listened as if enchanted." She paints these meetings in the warmest colours,[6] and she mentions that it was one of Chateaubriand's greatest pleasures to listen to her reading passages from his works. (Both in this book and elsewhere Madame de Saman shows herself to have been possessed of excellent literary taste.) He especially loved to hear her read his descriptions of landscape. "But sometimes," she says, "to affect him more profoundly, I produced _Les Martyrs_, and read the speeches and thanksgiving hymns of the confessors, or the thrilling prison and torture-chamber scenes. Then he could not restrain his tears. One day he began to weep; I continued to read; he sobbed convulsively; I still went on, and when I came to the passage which tells how Eudore secretly offered to sacrifice himself in order to win the salvation of his mother, who had been too weak in her love for her children, he could contain himself no longer, and burst into a passion of tears and sobs. It was a case of emotions returning to their source. His highly strung nerves gave way. Completely overcome, exhausted with weeping, he expressed his gratitude to me, said that he had never experienced such rapture, called me by all the sweet names men give to the Muses, told me that I was beautiful, more especially praised my eyes and their expression, imagining in the ardour of his passion that he had never seen anything like them before." The lady was at this time about twenty, Chateaubriand exactly sixty years old. This quotation shows us that even such frigid passages in _Les Martyrs_ as the speeches of the white-robed elders had really been _felt_ by the author himself. We are touched by this young and noble woman's enthusiastic admiration for an old man, and the man himself rises in the reader's estimation from the fact of his being able, even at that age, to win the love of such a woman. But it is in strange surroundings that we come upon this outburst of strong emotion, a thing so rare with Chateaubriand that it may almost be called unique. Champagne, the songs of his political and religious opponent, Béranger, caresses and declarations of love, fits of weeping and sobbing over _Les Martyrs_, followed by more love-making! What an environment for the epic of orthodoxy! What an excess of human passion in a Seraphic poet, a former minister of state and pilgrim to Jerusalem![7]