Correspondence

3052.  EBB to Sarah Jane Streatfeild

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 150–151.

[Paris]

Sunday [13 June 1852] [1]

We come back from church .. or rather chapel among the unorthodox [2]  .. & I have just ten minutes, to answer your letter in before the post hour. On our road we went to see Mrs Butler & the babe—the latter having scarcely time to suffer our visit, through an obligation which was on her to pay a visit to Colonel Cust [3] who had sent for her immediately on his arrival in Paris. She is looking in a glow of health & prettiness, & was as gracious as could be. She will go to Lady Augusta Bruce tomorrow, & to us, she says, on tuesday, when Wilson is ambitious of receiving the bonne to tea. I kissed her & ‘squeezed’ her for you & for me as well—she’s a darling. The bonne most impertinently observed that I had better not try to hold her in my arms, seeing that she was so very much heavier than my own child. I bore that insult with surprising philosophy & temperance on the whole.

Not a moment more for a word. I congratulate you warmly on the good news about Mr Cust [4] —so does Robert. Mrs Butler clapped her hands for joy. She told me to give you her best love.

In which we two more than join. God bless you–

Robert bids me say that he accepts no blame about the piano. Being commanded to do a thing, he did it—& examined the receipt long after by a philosophical habit of retrospection– I should have told you that he had Dr Macarthy’s grateful acknowledgement of the money you sent, in a letter to you which being too large to enclose, he keeps till he sees you.

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection.

1. Dated by EBB’s reference to Mrs. Streatfeild’s piano, a subject first mentioned in letter 3049.

2. Chapelle Taitbout.

3. Peregrine Francis Cust (1791–1873), lieutenant-colonel in the British Army and uncle of Henry Francis Cust, Mrs. Streatfeild’s fiancé.

4. Henry Francis Cust had recently been appointed private secretary to Lord Eglinton, the current Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

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