"M. de La Harpe divested himself, in the presence of Madame Récamier, of most of the defects which made commerce with him laborious and almost insupportable. He took pleasure in acting as her guide: he admired the swiftness with which her mind made good her want of experience and grasped all that he revealed to her concerning the world and mankind. It was at the time of the famous conversion which so many people have qualified as hypocrisy. I have always regarded that conversion as sincere. The sentiment of religion is an inherent faculty in man; it is absurd to pretend that fraud and falsehood have created that faculty. Nothing is put into the human soul except what nature has put there. The persecutions, the abuses of authority in favour of certain dogmas can delude us personally and revolt us against what we should feel if it were not imposed upon us; but, so soon as the external causes have ceased, we return to our primitive tendency: when there is no more courage in resisting, we no longer applaud ourselves for our resistance. Now, the Revolution having taken this merit from unbelief, the men whom vanity alone had rendered unbelieving were able to become religious in good faith. "M. de La Harpe was of that number; but he retained his intolerant character and that bitterness of disposition which made him conceive new hatreds without abjuring the old ones. All those thorns of his devotion disappeared, however, when he was with Madame Récamier." [Sidenote: M. de La Harpe.] Here are a few fragments of the letters from M. de La Harpe to Madame Récamier of which Benjamin Constant speaks: "SATURDAY, 28 _September._