"To those who are inclined to doubt the firmness of his Christian faith, you can tell this detail, which was given me by a Protestant lady who was for a long time his neighbour and who still lives in the house in which he died at No. 120, Rue du Bac. Madame Mohl[508] was very intimate with Madame de Chateaubriand, who did not go out and saw hardly any one. The wife of that truly great man used often to lament to her neighbour about the difficulty which she had to prevent her husband from following with the most scrupulous strictness the rules for Lent and the other seasons of fasting and abstinence. Chateaubriand had at that time reached the age at which the Church dispenses us from fasting, and his health suffered greatly from these austerities. He practised them, nevertheless, with his Breton stubbornness, and it needed all his wife's entreaties to make him give way sometimes. This was not done for the world nor for the sake of 'posing,' as one would say nowadays. Madame de Chateaubriand and her confidant were the only witnesses, and I am perhaps the only one to know of it to-day. Do you, who are young, keep and hand down this recollection of the author of the _Génie du Christianisme._ "I like indulging in this old man's gossip; but it is only thus that traditions are preserved. I have known a whole vanished world. There are hardly any people left who have seen Chateaubriand close. There are only two of us now at the French Academy who have seen Madame Récamier's _salon_: M. le Duc de Noailles and myself. Outside the Academy, I know only Madame Lenormant and Madame Mohl who have lived in that illustrious intimacy." In his conversations, as in his letters, Victor de Laprade loved to call up before my eyes those vanished days, those figures now extinguished. He used frequently to describe to me M. de Chateaubriand's punctual regularity. The great writer used to arrive at Madame Récamier's every day at half-past two; they took tea together and spent an hour in private chat. Then the door would open for visitors; the worthy Ballanche came first; after him, a wave of more or less numerous, more or less varied, more or less animated comers and goers, amid whom was the group of persons accustomed to see one another daily and, as Ballanche said, to "gravitate towards the centre" of the Abbaye-aux-Bois[509].