Robert is in good spirits, and inclined to like Paris increasingly.  Do you know I think you have an idea in England that you monopolise comforts, and I, for one, can’t admit it.  These snug ‘apartments’ exclude the draughty passages and staircases, which threaten your life every time that you run to your bedroom for a pocket-handkerchief in England.  I much prefer the Continental houses to the English ones, both for winter and summer, on this account.

So glad I am that you are nearly at the end of your work.  To rest after work, what more than rest that always is!

Write to us often—­do!  We are not in Italy, and you have no excuse for even seeming to forget us.  We are full in sight still, remember.

Are you aware that Carlyle travelled with us to Paris?  He left a deep impression with me.  It is difficult to conceive of a more interesting human soul, I think.  All the bitterness is love with the point reversed.  He seems to me to have a profound sensibility—­so profound and turbulent that it unsettles his general sympathies.  Do you guess what I mean the least in the world? or is it as dark as my writings are of course?

I hope on every account you will have no increase of domestic care.  How is Miss Procter?  How kind everybody was to us in England, and how affectionately we remember it!  God bless you yourself!  We love you for the past and the present, besides the future in December.

Your attached
E.B.B.

* * * * *

To Miss Mitford

[Paris,] 138 Avenue des Champs-Elysees:  October 22, [1851].

The pause in writing has come from the confusion in living, my ever dearest Miss Mitford, and no worse cause.  It was a long while before we could settle ourselves in a private apartment, and we had to stay at the hotel and wander about like doves turned out of the dove-cote, and seeking where to inhabit....  We have seen nothing in Paris, except the shell of it, yet.  No theatres—­nothing but business.  Yet two evenings ago we hazarded going to a ‘reception’ at Lady Elgin’s, in the Faubourg St. Germain, and saw some French, but nobody of distinction.  It is a good house, I believe, and she has an earnest face which must mean something.  We were invited, and are invited to go every Monday, and that Monday in particular, between eight and twelve.  You go in a morning dress, and there is tea.  Nothing can be more sans facon, and my tremors (for, do you know, I was quite nervous on the occasion, and charged Robert to keep close to me) were perfectly unjustified by the event.  You see it was an untried form of society—­like trying a Turkish bath.  I expected to see Balzac’s duchesses and hommes de lettres on all sides of me, but there was nothing very noticeable, I think, though we found it agreeable enough.  We go on Friday evening to a Madame Mohl’s, where we are to have some of the ‘celebrities,’