2971. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 151–154.
138 Avenue des Champs Elysèes
October 22. [1851] [1]
The pause in writing has come from the confusion of living, my ever dearest Miss Mitford, & no worse cause. It was a long while before we could settle ourselves in a private apartment, & we had to stay at the hotel & wander about like doves turned out of the dove cote, & seeking where to inhabit. It was hard you see to reconcile all our conditions of room enough, sun enough, cheapness enough, & the neighbourhood of the Madeleine, which dear Mr Kenyon desired for us that we might be near him when he came to the hotêl Canterbury, rue de la paix. At last we gave up the Madeleine by constraint, & came off to these Champs Elysèes to a very pleasant apartment, the windows looking over a large terrace (almost large enough to serve the purpose of a garden) to the great drive & promenade of the Parisians when they come out of the streets to sun & shade & show themselves off among the trees. A pretty little drawing room, a writing & dressing room for Robert beside it, a dining room beyond that, with two excellent bedrooms, & a third bedroom for a femme de menage, [2] kitchen &c. So this answers all our requirements, & the sun suns us loyally as in duty bound considering the southern aspect, and we are glad to find ourselves settled for six months. We have had lovely weather, & have seen a fire only yesterday for the first time since we left England—and my cough which hung on me so the whole nine weeks of our visit to London, has vanished altogether—at least you may hear it twice perhaps in the course of the day, which is not worth taking heed of. Plainly that English air is too heavy for lungs of mine——and for the heart too, in some ways obvious enough.
We have seen nothing in Paris except the shell of it yet. No theatres—nothing but business. Yet two evenings ago we hazarded going to a “reception” at Lady Elgin’s, in the Faubourg St Germain, & saw some French, but nobody of distinction. It is a good house, I believe, and she has an earnest face which must mean something. We were invited, (& are invited) to go every monday &, that monday in particular, between eight & twelve. You go in a morning dress,—& there is tea. Nothing can be more ‘sans façon,’ [3] & my tremors (for do you know I was quite nervous on the occasion & charged Robert to keep close to me) were perfectly unjustified by the event. You see it was an untried form of society—like trying a Turkish bath. I expected to see Balzac’s Duchesses & ‘hommes de lettres’ [4] on all sides of me, but there was nothing very noticeable, I think, though we found it agreeable enough. We go on friday evening to a Madme Mohl’s where we are to have some of the ‘celebrités’ 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: & Robert has one to Emile Forgues of the National, & Gavarni of the Charivari [5] .. so that we shall manage to thrust our heads into this atmosphere of Parisian journalism & learn by experience how it smells. I hear that George Sand is seldom at Paris now– She has devoted herself to playwriting, & employs a house-full of men, her son’s friends & 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 & twenty, [6] but she is fond of him. As for “les amours” she has lived purely enough for the last year, they tell me, .. she talks of herself as being less tormented by “ces passions d’enfer,” [7] & seems to resign herself, after some lingering struggles, to passing into a sort of elderly womanhood of George Sandism, such as that may be. Well—you shall hear whatever I hear & see, and you will come in the spring perhaps to see for yourself. You ought certainly to see Paris .. for the “grand spectacle” if for nothing else. It is wonderfully beautiful– I like to observe the honour done to genius on all sides– They have already called a street near us “Rue de Balzac”—and, do you know, there’s a “rue de Lord Byron” in this neighbourhood too. Show me such a thing in London.
Never expect me to agree with you in that “cause célébre” of “ladies & gentlemen” against people of letters. I dont like the sort of veneer which passes in society—yes, I like it, but I dont love it– I know what the thing is worth as a matter of furniture-accomplishment, & there an end. I would 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 & I recognize 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 & 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, & 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 & simple, & 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 [8] too in another way, the “lady” of the [‘]‘Letters from the Baltic”—nay, I liked her better than the “lady”.
Have you heard of poor Mr Chorley since the death of his mother? [9] We had a kind little letter from him a few days since. She seems to have died tranquilly, & his sister’s health has not suffered much from the shock apparently, & this gives him comfort. He says that he may come to Paris, when all his arrangements are made, and we shall be very glad to see him whenever he comes.
Do write to me & tell me of your house .. whether you are settling down in it comfortably. [10] In every new house, there’s a good deal of the bird’s work in treading & shuffling down the loose sticks & straws, before one can feel it to be a nest. Robert laughs at me sometimes for pushing about the chairs & 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 could’nt “tuck myself in” any how. And we enjoy in proportion these luxurious armchairs, so good for the Lollards.
People say that the troops which pass before our windows every few days through the ‘Arc de l’Etoile’ [11] to be reviewed, will bring the president back with them as “emperor” some sunny morning not far off. As to waiting till May, nobody expects it. There is great inward agitation, but the surface of things is smooth enough. Be constant—be constant!– Constancy is a rare virtue, even where it is not an undeniable piece of wisdom. Vive Napoleon II. [12]
As to the book [13] .. ah, you are always, & have always been, too good to me—that’s quite certain: and if you are not too good to my husband, it is only because, as I am persuaded in my secret soul, nobody can be too good to him.
He sends you his warm regards—and I send you a kiss of Baby’s, who is finishing his Babylonish education, unfortunate child, by learning a complement of french. I assure you he understands everything you can say to him in English as well as Italian, so that he wont be utterly denationalized.
God bless you. Say how you are & write soon–
Your ever affectionate
EBB–
Address: Miss Mitford / Swallowfield / near Reading.
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 329–333.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Year provided by postmark.
2. “Housemaid.”
3. “Informal.”
4. “Men of letters.”
5. “Gavarni,” pseudonym of Sulpice-Guillaume Chevalier (1804–66), a prolific French lithographer and caricaturist who contributed to the satirical magazine, Le Charivari, which was founded in 1832 by Charles Philipon (1802–62). It served as the inspiration for Punch: The London Charivari. Paul Émile Daurand Forgues (1813–83), French translator and journalist, contributed to Le National, a Parisian daily founded in 1830 in support of Louise Philippe; it was Republican at the time of this letter. Forgues had reviewed RB’s works in the Revue des Deux Mondes of 15 August 1847 (for the full text of this review, see vol. 14, pp. 386–397). He is listed in the Brownings’ address book of this period; see Appendix IV.
6. George Sand’s son, Jean François Maurice Dudevant (1823–89), was twenty-eight at this time; her daughter Solange (1828–99) was twenty-three.
7. “These passions of hell.”
8. Elizabeth Eastlake (née Rigby, 1809–93) was the author of Letters from the Shores of the Baltic (1841). In 1849 she married Sir Charles Eastlake, president of the Royal Academy.
9. Jane Chorley (née Wilkinson, 1779–1851) died on 23 September at Pimlico, London, where she had been living with her invalid daughter Mary Ann Chorley (1801–63) and son John Rutter Chorley (1806–67).
10. Miss Mitford moved from Three Mile Cross to Swallowfield on 23 September 1851.
11. i.e., the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile at the end of Avenue des Champs Élysées.
12. The French president, Louis Napoleon, would be proclaimed Napoleon III in 1852. EBB is forgetting François Joseph Charles Bonaparte (1811–32), only son of Napoleon I and Marie Louise of Austria, who was known to Bonapartists as Napoleon II. He never reigned, however, as he was unacceptable to the Allies. In 1818 he was made Duke of Reichstadt, the title by which he is better known.
13. Evidently, in a letter to EBB, Miss Mitford had expressed a kind opinion of Casa Guidi Windows, which had been sent to her a few months earlier (see letter 2919). She was of a different mind, however, in a July letter to Charles Boner; see SD1487.
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