Friday.—­I have had a good morning’s work, and at two o’clock comes your letter; dear friend, thank you.  What a coward I was!  I will go and walk and be happy for an hour, it is a grand frosty sunshine.  To-morrow morning early back to London.

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Madam’s letter made a very agreeable appearance upon the breakfast-table this morning when I entered that apartment at eleven o’clock.  I don’t know how I managed to sleep so much, but such was the fact—­after a fine broiling hot day’s utter idleness, part of which was spent on a sofa, a little in the Tuillery gardens, where I made a sketch that’s not a masterpiece, but p’raps Madam will like to see it:  and the evening very merrily with the Morning Chronicle, the Journal des Debats, and Jules Janin at a jolly little restaurateur’s at the Champs Elysees at the sign of the Petit Moulin Rouge.  We had a private room and drank small wine very gaily, looking out into a garden full of green arbours, in almost every one of which were gentlemen and ladies in couples come to dine au frais, and afterwards to go and dance at the neighbouring dancing garden of Mabille.  Fiddlers and singers came and performed for us:  and who knows I should have gone to Mabille too, but there came down a tremendous thunderstorm, with flashes of lightning to illuminate it, which sent the little couples out of the arbours, and put out all the lights of Mabille.  The day before I passed with my aunt and cousins, who are not so pretty as some members of the family, but are dear good people, with a fine sense of fun, and we were very happy until the arrival of two newly married snobs, whose happiness disgusted me and drove me home early to find three acquaintances smoking in the moonlight at the hotel door, who came up and passed the night in my rooms.  No, I forgot, I went to the play first; but only for an hour—­I couldn’t stand more than an hour of the farce, which made me laugh while it lasted, but left a profound black melancholy behind it.  Janin said last night that life was the greatest of pleasures to him; that every morning, when he woke, he was thankful to be alive; that he was always entirely happy, and had never known any such thing as blue devils, or repentance, or satiety.  I had great fun giving him authentic accounts of London.  I told him that to see the people boxing in the streets was a constant source of amusement to us; that in November you saw every lamp-post on London Bridge with a man hanging from it who had committed suicide—­and he believed everything.  Did you ever read any of the works of Janin?—­No? well, he has been for twenty years famous in France, and he on his side has never heard of the works of Titmarsh, nor has anybody else here, and that’s a comfort.  I have got very nice rooms, but they cost ten francs a day:  and I began in a dignified manner with a domestique de place, but sent him away after two days:  for the idea that he was in the anteroom