Another time, the celebrated Gall[467], again at Madame de Custine's, dined next to me, without knowing me, mistook my facial angle, took me for a frog, and tried, when he knew who I was, to patch up his science in a way which made me blush for him. The shape of the head can assist one in distinguishing the sex in individuals, in indicating what belongs to the beast, to the animal passions; as to the intellectual faculties, phrenology will never know them. If one could collect the different skulls of the great men who have died since the commencement of the world, and were to place them before the eyes of the phrenologists without telling them to whom they belonged, they would not forward one brain to its right address: the examination of the "bumps" would produce the most comical mistakes. I feel conscience-smitten: I spoke of M. de Saint-Martin a trifle scoffingly; I am sorry for it. That love of scoffing, which I am constantly thrusting back and which incessantly returns to me, is a cause of suffering to me; for I hate the satirical spirit as being the pettiest, commonest, and easiest of all: of course, I am bringing no charge against high comedy. M. de Saint-Martin was, when all is said and done, a man of great merit, of noble and independent character. His ideas, when they were explicable, were lofty and of a superior nature. Ought I not to sacrifice the two foregoing pages to the generous and much too flattering declaration of the author of the _Portrait de M. de Saint-Martin fait par lui-même[468]?_ I should not hesitate to suppress them, if what I say were able to do the smallest hurt to the serious reputation of M. de Saint-Martin and to the esteem which will always cling to his memory. I am glad, for the rest, to see that my recollection has not deceived me: M. de Saint-Martin may not have received quite the same impressions as myself at the dinner of which I speak; but you will see that I have not invented the scene, and that M. de Saint-Martin's account resembles mine at bottom: "On the 27th of January 1803," he says, "I had an interview with M. de Chateaubriand at a dinner arranged for the purpose at M. Neveu's, in the Polytechnic School[469]. It would have been a great advantage to me to have known him earlier: he is the only irreproachable man of letters with whom I have come into contact in my existence, and even then I enjoyed his conversation only during the meal. For, immediately afterwards, there came a visit which made him dumb for the rest of the evening, and I do not know when the occasion will return, because the king of this world takes great care to put a spoke in the wheel of my cart. For the rest, of whom do I stand in need except God?" M. de Saint-Martin is worth a thousand of me: the dignity of his last sentence crushes my harmless banter with all the weight of a serious nature.