His retreat is described in one of his letters home: 

     “MORNEX, August 31 (1862).

     “MY DEAREST MOTHER,

“This ought to arrive on the evening before your birthday:  it is not possible to reach you in the morning, not even by telegraph as I once did from Mont Cenis, for—­(may Heaven be devoutly thanked therefore)—­there are yet on Mont Saleve neither rails nor wires....

“The place I have got to is at the end of all carriage-roads, and I am not yet strong enough to get farther, on foot, than a five or six miles’ circle, within which is assuredly no house to my mind.  I cast, at first, somewhat longing eyes on a true Savoyard chateau—­notable for its lovely garden and orchard—­and its unspoiled, unrestored, arched gateway between two round turrets, and Gothic-windowed keep.  But on examination of the interior—­finding the walls, though six feet thick, rent to the foundation—­and as cold as rocks, and the floors all sodden through with walnut oil and rotten-apple juice—­heaps of the farm stores having been left to decay in the ci-devant drawing room, I gave up all medieval ideas, for which the long-legged black pigs who lived like gentlemen at ease in the passage, and the bats and spiders who divided between them the corners of the turret-stair, have reason—­if they knew it—­to be thankful.

“The worst of it is that I never had the gift, nor have I now the energy, to make anything of a place; so that I shall have to put up with almost anything I can find that is healthily habitable in a good situation.  Meantime, the air here being delicious and the rooms good enough for use and comfort, I am not troubling myself much, but trying to put myself into better health and humour; in which I have already a little succeeded.”

After describing the flowers of the Saleve he continues: 

“My Father would be quite wild at the ‘view’ from the garden terrace—­but he would be disgusted at the shut in feeling of the house, which is in fact as much shut in as our old Herne Hill one; only to get the ‘view’ I have but to go as far down the garden as to our old ‘mulberry tree.’  By the way there’s a magnificent mulberry tree, as big as a common walnut, covered with black and red fruit on the other side of the road.  Coutet and Allen are very anxious to do all they can now that Crawley is away; and I don’t think I shall manage very badly,” etc.

A little later he took in addition a cottage in which the Empress of Russia had once stayed:  it commanded a finer view than the larger house, which has since been turned into a hotel (Hotel et Pension des Glycines).  This place was for some time the hermitage in which he wrote his political economy.  Of his lonely rambles he wrote later on: