I am sure it will do you great good to have change and liberty and distraction in various ways.  The ‘anxiety’ you speak of—­oh, I do hope it does not relate to Gerardine.  I always think of her when you seem anxious.

I shall be very glad if, when you come, you should be inclined to give your attention, you with your honest and vigorous mind, to the facts of the political situation, not the facts as you hear them from the English, or from our friend Madme Mohl, who confessed to me one day that she liked exaggerations because she hated the President.  She is a clever shrewd woman, but most eminently and on all subjects a woman; her passions having her thoughts inside them, instead of her thoughts her passions.  That’s the common distinction between women and men, is it not?

Robert, too, will tell you that he hates all Buonapartes, past, present, or to come, but then he says that in his self-willed, pettish way, as a manner of dismissing a subject he won’t think about—­and knowing very well that he doesn’t think about it, not mistaking a feeling for a reason, not for a moment.  There’s the difference between women and men.

Well, but you won’t come here to knit your brows about politics, but rather to forget all sorts of anxieties and distresses, and be well and happy, I do hope.  You deserve a holiday after all that work.  God bless you, dear friend.

Our united love goes to you and stays with you.

Your ever affectionate
BA.

* * * * *

To Miss Mulock

[Paris]:  138 Avenue des Champs-Elysees:  April 27, [1852].

I am afraid you must think me—­what can you have thought of me for not immediately answering a letter which brought the tears both to my eyes and my husband’s?  I was going to write just so, but he said:  ’No, do not write yet; wait till we get the book and then you can speak of it with knowledge.’  And I waited.

But the misfortune is that Messrs. Chapman & Hall waited too, and that up to the present time ‘The Head of the Family’ has not arrived.  Mr. Chapman is slow in finding what he calls his opportunities.

Therefore I can’t wait any more, no indeed.  The voice which called ‘Dinah’ in the garden—­which was true, because certainly I did call from Florence with my whole heart to the writer of these verses[13] (how deeply they moved me!)—­will have seemed to you by this time as fabulous as the garden itself.  And we had no garden at Florence, I must confess to you, only a terrace facing the grey wall of San Felice church, where we used to walk up and down on the moonlight nights.  But San Felice was always a good saint to me, and when I had read and cried over those verses from the ‘Athenaeum’ (my husband wrote them out for me at the reading room) and when I had vainly written to England to find out the poet, and when I had all as vainly, on our visit to England last summer, inquired of this person and that person, it turns out after all that ‘Dinah’ answers me.  Do you not think I am glad?