February 15, 1866:  Mrs. Austin

To Mrs. Austin.  LUXOR, February 15, 1866.

Dearest Mutter,

I have only time for a short letter to say that the cold weather is over and that I continue to improve, not very fast, but still very sensibly.

My young Frenchman turns out to be a M. Brune grand prix de Rome, an architect, and is a very nice fellow indeed, and a thorough gentleman.  His odd awkward manner proved to be mere vexation at finding himself quartered nolens volens on a stranger, and a woman; but we have made great friends, and I have made him quite happy by telling him that he shall pay his share of the food.  He was going to hurry off from shyness though he had begun a work here by which I fancy he hopes to get Kudos.  I see he is poor and very properly proud.  He goes out to the temple at sunrise, and returns to dinner at dark, and works well, and his drawings are very clever.  In short, I am as much obliged to the French Consul for sending me such an intelligent man as I was vexed at first.  An homme serieux with an absorbing pursuit is always good company in the long run.  Moreover M. Brune behaves like a perfect gentleman in every way.  So tout est pour le mieux.

I am sorry to say that Marie has become so excessively bored, dissatisfied, and, she says, ill, that I am going to send her back rather than be worried so—­and damit hats eine ende of European maids.  Of course an ignorant girl must be bored to death here—­a land of no amusements and no flirtation is unbearable.  I shall borrow a slave of a friend here, an old black woman who is quite able and more than willing to serve me, and when I go down to Cairo I will get either a ci-devant slave or an elderly Arab woman.  Dr. Patterson strongly advised me to do so last year.  He had one who has been thirteen years his housekeeper, an old bedaweeyeh, I believe, and as I now am no longer looked upon as a foreigner, I shall be able to get a respectable Arab woman, a widow or a divorced woman of a certain age who will be too happy to have ’a good home,’ as our maids say.  I think I know one, a certain Fatoomeh, a widow with no children who does washing and needlework in Cairo.  You need not be at all uneasy.  I shall be taken good care of if I fall ill, much better than I should get from a European in a sulky frame of mind.  Hajjee Ali has very kindly offered to take Marie down to Cairo and start her off to Alexandria, whence Ross’s people can send her home.  If she wants to stay in Alexandria and get placed by the nuns who piously exhorted her to extort ninety francs a month from me, so much the better for me.  Ali refuses to take a penny from me for her journey—­besides bringing me potatoes and all sorts of things:  and if I remonstrate he says he and all his family and all they have is mine, in consequence of my treatment of his brother.