I believe, for she seems to know everybody of all colours, from white to red.  Then Mazzini is to give us a letter to George Sand—­come what will, we must have a letter to George Sand—­and Robert has one to Emile Lorquet of the ‘National,’ and Gavarni of the ‘Charivari,’ so that we shall manage to thrust our heads into this atmosphere of Parisian journalism, and learn by experience how it smells.  I hear that George Sand is seldom at Paris now.  She has devoted herself to play-writing, and employs a houseful of men, her son’s friends and her own, in acting privately with her what she writes—­trying it on a home stage before she tries it at Paris.  Her son is a very ordinary young man of three-and-twenty, but she is fond of him....

Never expect me to agree with you in that cause celebre of ’ladies and gentlemen’ against people of letters.  I don’t like the sort of veneer which passes in society—­yes, I like it, but I don’t love it.  I know what the thing is worth as a matter of furniture-accomplishment, and there an end.  I should rather look at the scratched silent violin in the corner, with the sense that music has come out of it or will come.  I am grateful to the man who has written a good book, and I recognise reverently that the roots of it are in him.  And, do you know, I was not disappointed at all in what I saw of writers of books in London; no, not at all.  Carlyle, for instance, I liked infinitely more in his personality than I expected to like him, and I saw a great deal of him, for he travelled with us to Paris and spent several evenings with us, we three together.  He is one of the most interesting men I could imagine even, deeply interesting to me; and you come to understand perfectly, when you know him, that his bitterness is only melancholy, and his scorn sensibility.  Highly picturesque too he is in conversation.  The talk of writing men is very seldom as good.

And, do you know, I was much taken, in London, with a young authoress, Geraldine Jewsbury.  You have read her books.  There’s a French sort of daring, half-audacious power in them, but she herself is quiet and simple, and drew my heart out of me a good deal.  I felt inclined to love her in our half-hour’s intercourse.  And I liked Lady Eastlake too in another way, the ‘lady’ of the ‘Letters from the Baltic,’ nay, I liked her better than the ’lady’....

Do write to me and tell me of your house, whether you are settling down in it comfortably[4].  In every new house there’s a good deal of bird’s work in treading and shuffling down the loose sticks and straws, before one can feel it is to be a nest.  Robert laughs at me sometimes for pushing about the chairs and tables in a sort of distracted way, but it’s the very instinct of making a sympathetical home, that works in me.  We were miserably off in London.  I couldn’t tuck myself in anyhow.  And we enjoy in proportion these luxurious armchairs, so good for the Lollards.