His first volume of collected poems was published in 1836, and one by one eminent men of letters, struck by the beauty, severity, and freshness of his diction, sought out the new light and entered into brotherhood with him. His lifelong friendship with M. de Fresne, however, dated from 1829, when he had already published _The Angel and the Child_,[33] in a Paris magazine, and other pieces at various intervals in local periodicals. A traveller from the capital knocked at the unknown poet's door, and the tie knit by the first external homage that had yet come to Reboul, was never dissolved. The letters from which we draw his portrait, as traced by himself, were all addressed to this first friend. In 1838, another and more illustrious visitor came to the baker's home at Nîmes, the patriarch of revived Christian literature in France, the immortal Châteaubriand. He tells the story of his visit himself: "I found him in his bakery, and spoke to him without knowing to whom I was speaking, not distinguishing him from his companions in the trade of Ceres; he took my name, and said he would see if the person I wanted was at home. He came back presently and smilingly made himself known to me. He took me through his shop, where we groped about in a labyrinth of flour-sacks, and at last climbed by a sort of ladder into a little retreat (_réduit_) something like the chamber of a windmill. There we sat down and talked. I was as happy as in my barn in London,[34] and much happier than in my minister's chair in Paris." Reboul was an ardent Catholic, an uncompromising "ultramontane," as their enemies designate those who refuse to render unto Cæsar the things that are God's. He took a keen and sensitive interest in the struggles of religion against infidelity, the prototypes, or rather the counterparts, of those we see now waging in Italy and Germany. On the occasion of one of these attacks on the church in 1844, he writes these trenchant words: "The sword is drawn between the religious and the political power: if I were not a Frenchman before being a royalist, and a Catholic before a Frenchman, I should find much to rejoice at in this check to the hopes of a certain part of the episcopate who honestly believed in the reign of religious freedom, on the word of the revolutionists. But, good people! if revolution were not despotism, it would not be revolution." The unity of the church struck him as immeasurably grand. Speaking of the great Spanish convert Donoso-Cortes and his religious works, he says: "What a marvellous faith it is which makes men situated at such distances of time and place think exactly alike on the most difficult and deepest subjects!" A most striking passage in his writings is the following opinion on the Reformation: