You please me—­oh, so much—­by the words about my husband.  When you wrote to praise my poems, of course I had to bear it—­I couldn’t turn round and say, ’Well, and why don’t you praise him, who is worth twenty of me?  Praise my second Me, as well as my Me proper, if you please.’  One’s forced to be rather decent and modest for one’s husband as well as for one’s self, even if it’s harder.  I couldn’t pull at your coat to read ‘Pippa Passes,’ for instance.  I can’t now.

But you have put him on the shelf, so we have both taken courage to send you his new volumes, ‘Men and Women,’ not that you may say ’pleasant things’ of them or think yourself bound to say anything indeed, but that you may accept them as a sign of the esteem and admiration of both of us.  I consider them on the whole an advance upon his former poems, and am ready to die at the stake for my faith in these last, even though the discerning public should set it down afterwards as only a ’Heretic’s Tragedy.’

Our friend Mr. Jarves came to read a part of your letter to us, confirmatory of doctrines he had heard from us on an earlier day.  The idea of your writing the art criticisms of the ‘Leader’ (!) was so stupendously ludicrous, there was no need of faith in your loyalty to laugh the whole imputation, at first hearing, to uttermost scorn.  I must say, in justice to Mr. Jarves, that he never did really believe one word of it, though a good deal ruffled and pained that it should have been believed by anybody.  He is full of admiring and grateful feeling for you, and has gone on to Italy in that mind.

As for me, I almost yearn to go too.  We have fallen into a pit here in Paris, upon evil days and rooms, an impulsive friend having taken an apartment for us facing the east, insufficiently protected, and with a bedroom wanting, so that we are still waiting, with trunks unpacked, and our child sleeping on the floor, till we can get emancipated anyhow.  Then, through the last week’s cold, I have not been well—­only it will not, I think, be much, as I am better already, and there will be no practical end to the talk of Nice and Pau, which my husband had begun a little.  All this has hindered me from following my first impulse of thanking you for your letter immediately.

How beautiful Paris is, and how I agree with you, as we both did with dear Miss Mitford, on the subject of Louis Napoleon.  I approve of him exactly because I am a democrat, and not at all for an exceptional reason.  I hold that the most democratical government in Europe is out and out the French Government (which doesn’t exclude the absolutist element, far from it); but who in England understands this? and that the representative man of France, the incarnate republic, is the man Louis Napoleon?  An extraordinary man he is.  I never was a Buonapartist, though the legend of the First Napoleon has wrung tears from me before now, and I was very sorry when Louis Napoleon was elected instead of Cavaignac.  At the coup d’etat I was not sorry.  And since then I have believed in him more and more.