You say nothing specific.  How I should like to know why exactly you are out of spirits, and whether dear Mr. Martin is sad too.  Robert and I have had some domestic emeutes, because he hates some imperial names; yet he confessed to me last night that the excessive and contradictory nonsense he had heard among Legitimists, Orleanists, and English, against the movement inclined him almost to a revulsion of feeling.

I would have written to you to-day, even if I had not received your letter.  You will forgive that what I have written should have been scratched in the utmost haste to save the post.  I can’t even read it over.  There’s the effect of going out to walk the first thing in the morning....

Your ever affectionate
BA—­to both of you.

* * * * *

To Miss Mitford

[Paris,] 138 Avenue des Champs-Elysees:  Christmas Eve, [1851].

What can you have thought of me?  That I was shot or deserved to be?  Forgive in the first instance, dearest friend, and believe that I won’t behave so any more, if in any way I can help it.

Tell me your thought now about L. Napoleon.  He rode under our windows on December 2 through an immense shout from the Carrousel to the Arc de l’Etoile.  There was the army and the sun of Austerlitz, and even I thought it one of the grandest of sights; for he rode there in the name of the people, after all....

But we know men most opposed to him, writers of the old ‘Presse’ and ‘National,’ and Orleanists, and Legitimists, and the fury of all such I can scarcely express to you after the life.  Emile de Girardin and his friends had a sublime scheme of going over in a body to England, and establishing a Socialist periodical, inscribing on their new habitation, ‘Ici c’est la France.’  He actually advertised for sale his beautiful house close by in the Champs-Elysees, asked ten thousand pounds (English) for it; and would have been ‘rather disappointed,’ as one of his sympathising friends confessed to us, if the offer had been accepted.  I heard a good story the other day.  A lady visitor was groaning politically to Madame de Girardin over the desperateness of the situation.  ’Il n’y a que Celui, qui est en haut, qui peut nous en tirer,’ said she, casting up her eyes.  ‘Oui, c’est vrai,’ replied Madame, ‘il le pourrait, lui,’ glancing towards the second floor, where Emile was at work upon feuilletons.  Not that she mistakes him habitually for her deity, by any manner of means, if scandal is to be listened to.

I hear that Lamennais is profoundly disgusted.  He said to a friend of ours, that the French people were ‘putrefied to the heart.’  Which means that they have one tradition still dear to them (the name of Napoleon) and that they put no faith in the Socialistic prophets.  Wise or unwise they may be accordingly; but an affection and an apprehension can’t reasonably be said to amount to a ‘putrefaction,’ I think.  No, indeed.