Penini, the pet, is radiant, and learning French triumphantly.  May God bless you!  Write to me, dearest Mrs. Martin, and tell me of both of you.  Robert’s love.

Your ever, ever affectionate
BA.

* * * * *

To Mrs. Jameson

[Paris]:  3 Rue du Colisee:  February 28, 1856 [postmark].

My dearest Mona Nina,—­Three letters, one on the top of another, and I don’t answer.  Shame on me.  How I have thought of you, to make up!  And you write to apologise to us, from a dreamy mystical apprehension that we may peradventure have lost eightpence on your account!  Well, it would have been awful if we had.  And so Providence interposed with a special miracle, and obliged the officials to accept the actual penny stamp for the fourpenny stamp you meant to put, and we paid just nothing for the terrible letter!  Take heart, therefore, in future, before all hypothetical misfortunes.  That’s the moral of the tale....

My dear friend, how shall I pull you and make you come to Paris?  Madame de Triqueti was here the other day, and spoke of you, and swore she wouldn’t help to take rooms for you, unless you came near her.  As to the two rooms you speak of, I am sure you might have what rooms you pleased now, in this neighbourhood.  What would you give?  Our present apartment is comfort itself, and except some cold days a short time after you went away, we have really had no winter.  The miraculous warmth has saved me, for I was so felled in that Rue de Grenelle, I should scarcely have had force against an ordinary cold season.  Little Penini has been blossoming like a rose all the time.  Such a darling, idle, distracted child he is, not keeping his attention for three minutes together for the hour and a half I teach him, and when I upbraid him for it, throwing himself upon me like a dog, kissing my cheeks and head and hands.  ’O you little pet, dive me one chance more!  I will really be dood,’ and learning everything by magnetism, getting on in seven weeks, for instance, to read French quite surprisingly.  He has written a poem on the war and the peace, called ‘Soldiers going and coming,’ which Robert and I thought so remarkable that I sent it to Mr. Forster.  Oh, such a darling, that child is!  I expect the wings to grow presently.

As for my poem (far below Penini’s), I work on steadily and have put in order and transcribed five books, containing in all above six thousand lines ready for the press.  I have another book to put together and transcribe, and then must begin the composition part of one or two more books, I suppose.  I must be ready for printing by the time we go to England, in June.  Robert too is much occupied with ’Sordello,’[49] and we neither of us receive anybody till past four o’clock.  I mean that when you have read my new book, you put away all my other poems or most of them, and know me only by the new.  Oh, I am so anxious to make it good.  I have put much of myself in it—­I mean to say, of my soul, my thoughts, emotions, opinions; in other respects, there is not a personal line, of course.  It’s a sort of poetic art-novel.  If it’s a failure, there will be the comfort of having made a worthy effort, of having done it as well as I could.  Write soon to me, and love us both constantly, as we do you.