Lucie, Lucie, my dear child, don’t tear your frock:  tearing frocks is not of itself a proof of genius.  But write as your mother writes, act as your mother acts:  be frank, loyal, affectionate, simple, honest, and then integrity or laceration of frock is of little import.  And Lucie, dear child, mind your arithmetic.  You know in the first sum of yours I ever saw there was a mistake.  You had carried two (as a cab is licensed to do), and you ought, dear Lucie, to have carried but one.  Is this a trifle?  What would life be without arithmetic but a scene of horrors?  You are going to Boulogne, the city of debts, peopled by men who have never understood arithmetic.  By the time you return, I shall probably have received my first paralytic stroke, and shall have lost all recollection of you.  Therefore I now give you my parting advice—­don’t marry anybody who has not a tolerable understanding and a thousand a year.  And God bless you, dear child.

At Boulogne she sat next Heine at table d’hote.  ’He heard me speak German to my mother, and soon began to talk to me, and then said, “When you go back to England, you can tell your friends that you have seen Heinrich Heine.”  I replied, “And who is Heinrich Heine?” He laughed heartily and took no offence at my ignorance; and we used to lounge on the end of the pier together, where he told me stories in which fish, mermaids, water-sprites and a very funny old French fiddler with a poodle were mixed up in the most fanciful manner, sometimes humorous, and very often pathetic, especially when the water-sprites brought him greetings from the “Nord See.”  He was . . . so kind to me and so sarcastic to every one else.’  Twenty years afterwards the little girl whose ’braune Augen’ Heine had celebrated in his charming poem Wenn ich an deinem Hause, used to go and see the dying poet in Paris.  ‘It does one good,’ he said to her, ’to see a woman who does not carry about a broken heart, to be mended by all sorts of men, like the women here, who do not see that a total want of heart is their real failing.’  On another occasion he said to her:  ’I have now made peace with the whole world, and at last also with God, who sends thee to me as a beautiful angel of death:  I shall certainly soon die.’  Lady Duff Gordon said to him:  ’Poor Poet, do you still retain such splendid illusions, that you transform a travelling Englishwoman into Azrael?  That used not to be the case, for you always disliked us.’  He answered:  ’Yes, I do not know what possessed me to dislike the English, . . . it really was only petulance; I never hated them, indeed, I never knew them.  I was only once in England, but knew no one, and found London very dreary, and the people and the streets odious.  But England has revenged herself well; she has sent me most excellent friends—­thyself and Milnes, that good Milnes.’