3464. EBB to Sarianna Browning
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 297–298.
[Florence]
[Postmark: 2 September 1854]
<***> we must all blame & disapprove to the uttermost bound, within that imputation.
So glad I am that you like the verses. [1] It’s quite a pleasure that you should like them– But Penini is our best poem I assure you, as Miss Haworth admitted once. He passes with our friends here as a “most original child.” Let me tell you how funny he was yesterday. He was dilating on something he had seen at the bazaar—“Such a beau-tiful dinner-service. All silver! wiz cotton-wool between the plates!” Then turning to Robert—“Twelve pauls! I sint you might buy it for me dear papa.” Papa observes in a hardhearted way that “twelve pauls is too much to give to anybody who does’nt understand Greek.” On which Penini throws himself at once into an oratorical attitude—“Here’s a gift on my thumb!!” [2] (pronounced sumb of course) “I think the Spirits have been looking round the world to find something pretty for Penini—and they found this beau-tiful dinner-service at the bazaar! Then they put a gift on the nail of my sumb, to show that my papa ought to give it to me.”! If you had seen the air, the manner!– He is such an irresistible darling!
It will be quite encouraging to you, Sarianna, to find that there’s hope of our getting to Paris “in nine years.” You know the angels are said not to understand time. Our particular angel is very fond of talking of ‘years’ and “months,” & attaches most singular ideas to the words–
Do be careful, both of you, in these cholera times. I should have hoped, dear, that you might have gone for a month into the country– Would it have cost so much? And the benefit to both of you would have been great. Your heat seems to have been greater than any we have had here, though it was above ninety yesterday in the shade on our terrace. Our’s, which had given place to a delicious coolness, has come back a little during the last few days, & Robert & I slept with one of our windows open last night. Penini is looking wonderfully better & fatter– Oh—how I should like you to see him. I am quite easy about him now. Do you drink the wine—or the beer? Do be careful to take sufficient nutriment, as that seems to be a great security against cholera. [3] I have behaved so infamously to some of my correspondents in England—indeed to everybody except my sisters .. that I know nothing of anybody– Oh—I ought to have told you that Robert has fallen into a state of scepticism about his mesmerizees– We go out to drive nearly every evening in one or another of our friends’ carriages,—very often in Mrs Kinney’s. People are very attentive & kind to us, &, with all our vexations about money (which last, you see! it is stupendous!) we have had a very pleasant summer, & Robert says he never liked Florence so much. By the way .. do you know I actually wrote a letter to press you to come (on first finding that we could’nt go) but he made me tear it up? Because, he said, it was a mad thing to drag you here at such an expense, when next summer we shd certainly be in Paris!—— God bless you both.
Your ever attached sister Ba
Address, in RB’s hand: Mademoiselle Browning, / chez M. Byrne, / Avenue des Champs Elysées 138. / Paris.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Lilly Library.
1. Presumably Two Poems.
2. “A white speck on the finger-nails, supposed to portend a gift” (OED).
3. The Times of 8 August 1854 carried a report on the incidence of cholera in Paris: “The hospital returns for the last fortnight in July, and to the 2d inst., give 633 cases, or an average of 42 and a fraction daily, about one-half of which, that is 21, were fatal. It is more difficult to ascertain the cases in private houses. They are perhaps about once and a half as much. … It is remarked that the days of the greatest mortality were the 28th, 29th, and 30th of July … in consequence of the great heat” (p. 8). The cholera report from The Times of 14 August stated that the disease had “considerably diminished in Paris within the last few days” (p. 7).
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