1744. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 198–201.
[London]
Oct. 24. 1844.
Ever dearest Miss Mitford[,] The thought of seeing you is like dew to the grass. I have been quite green ever since I had it. Still it is right to tell you (I begin to think that there is some virtue of generosity in me!) that Mr Kenyon will be at Dover today, & at Hastings in three days, & will not be at home until the week after next, at best. I wd not let you come blindfolded, & just miss him, without knowing that the delay of a week would bring you face to face with him! Well—will you put off the visit? or will you make it, & sacrifice Mr Kenyon? I was forced to tell you—but it cant be incumbent on me to press you not to come till the week after. No, no. I have done what was barely right—& the supererogatory generosities I will not meddle with. Now, answer. Am I to see you? Will you come? And for how long? If you wd come & stay till over the time of Mr Kenyon’s return, all wd be reconciled,—and really, really, my dearest friend, there was something like an oath, … I think you had “styx nine times round you,” [1] .. to the effect, that, if you didn’t go to Paris, you wd come to London for two months. Now confess that you are partly bound to it. And if not two months, (I am not a hard task-mistress!) why not a fortnight at the least. You wd have your old room for a trifle at this dead end of the season,—(I mention it, because I know you will not be at ease with any other arrangement)—and then if I cd persuade you to allow your maid to live here at meal times, & to understand that there was always a tray of cold chicken &c for yourself, ready in this house at the movement of a finger, .. why what talks we might have, .. what joy for me!—!! Do think of it, my beloved friend! Do weigh everything with a steady hand, & consider it! It seems to me a sensible arrangement,—and delightful far beyond what sensible arrangements cd be expected to be. As to Flush, he is safe at home, & ready to receive you. He came in, drenched with rain, & a halter round his neck, just as if he had escaped hanging; & they cried out against his throwing himself on the sofa, for me to embrace him! He kissed me heartily on the mouth,—& I did not mind the wet. Dearest Flushie!– When he came into the house he began to cry. Was not that strange? His heart was over-full: & for two days after, he seemed low & languid, as if the adversities, from which he had escaped, had left their oppression on him. But he is well & lively now. Mr Hunter was very cross with him for causing me so much pain by allowing himself to be enticed away, & reproached him for it (the other day) in such language as, … “Naughty Flush—you deserve to be ‘taken away’. The men were quite right to take you, & I hope they made you suffer for it.” Flush looked into his face & then into mine, & began to cry most piteously. He cried again & again, at every new reproach. I am persuaded he understood it all.
When the thief gave him up, Alfred said, “And how soon do you mean to have him again?” The answer was “As soon as we can get him! And the next time, his price will be ten pounds.” Is it not astonishing insolence?
Camille Maupin is only real, I believe, in Balzac’s creations. [2] You hear of her again, in that unpleasant but very clever work of his, called Beatrix. Oh—I shd like to read all those books again according to the dates of their composition, & live regularly through the whole experience. His manner of trusting to his personnages, as if they were true men & women, & returning upon them repeatedly, is a great charm to me,—& I am delighted that you feel it to be a charm. The “Grand homme de Province à Paris” was surely in the list I gave you. I was very much struck with it,—so much so, as to go twice through it. You know I have a sort of fever about literary life—it is an aspect of life particularly interesting to me. Did you read the “Femme Superieure,”—in which also there are very striking verses. To go back, .. Lucien’s return to his province, I have sought in vain, & wd give much to read it. Tell me under what title of a book, I am likely to find that history. [3] Oh—how I should like to read all these books according to the right succession of them! It wd add so to the interest.
I often find uncut leaves, & in the most interesting of the romances too!
I thought I had read only the third volume of “Le Juif,”—but your fourth must be my third, for I have assuredly read the madhouse scene—& a very fine thing it is. How finely the whole treachery is worked up under that damnable doctor (really one cant help using strong words, on the subject of these French books—) from the moment in which he takes snuff & looks into the eyes of the Princesse. Do you remember that moment? Did that look thrill you all through, as it did me?– Indeed, I was held without breath throughout the family session, & the carriage-drive. Poor, exquisite Adrienne! Yet I wished for more clear-mindedness at the last,—& a less, feeble (however pathetic) falling into the snare. I am sensitive & excitable, but I do not conceive that I should have doubted my own sanity under those circumstances,—should you? Remember she is represented as an active & independent thinker. Still, it is a scene of extraordinary power, & wrings the withers of the heart. That Eugene Sue has wonderful imagination,—although Balzac is the greater, because the more complete, writer. One is the greater enchanter, the other the greater man—is it not so? I do wish I had the other volumes of the ‘Juif Errant’—but I suppose they are not written yet. [4]
Another letter from Miss Martineau (which I will send to you when I get it back from Mr Kenyon), [5] tells me she is well, can walk five miles a day, .. and has a clairvoyant case in her house, of a housemaid who talks awful mysteries of the soul & the hereafter, & distinguishes between what is taught at church & “what is true.” She (Miss M) says that magnetism is “true to the greatest extent claimed for it,” and that she “means to avouch it.” You shall see the letter. What is extraordinary is, that, although she is well, by means, as she believes, of magnetism, she has never yet been thrown into the magnetic sleep, & we were all wrong in fancying that she had. This of course diminishes the force of her testimony.
Well—I shall not write any more today. Did you receive a long letter from me before my news about Flush? [6] I hope so. Do write soon. I shall be more anxious for the post than usual, since I may hear by it that I shall see you “on a day.” May God bless you, ever dearest Miss Mitford!–
Most affectionately your
EBB–
Address: Miss Mitford / Three Mile Cross / near Reading.
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 11–13.
Manuscript: Fitzwilliam Museum.
1. Cf. Pope, Ode for Musick. On St. Cecilia;s Day (1713), line 91.
2. Camille Maupin was the pseudonym of Félicité des Touches, a recurring character in Balzac’s novels who first appears in Béatrix (1839).
3. At the end of Un Grand Homme de Province à Paris (1839), Lucien leaves Paris, but the account of his return to Angoulême is taken up in David Séchard ou les Souffrances de l’Inventeur (1843), a work EBB discusses in letters 1794 and 1797.
4. Eugène Sue’s Le Juif Errant was not completed until 1845.
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