5270. RB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 285–287.
Chez M. Laraison,
Ste Marie, près Pornic, Loire Inférieure
Aug. 19. ’63
—and the first time I am without a letter from you, dearest Isa: it is either sent to London, or misdirected to Paris, or lost—it shall not be, unwritten because you are ill,—I will not think of that. I sent you a book & a photograph [1] by Mr Trollope—who was just about to leave for Florence—of course, I sent the proper note this day last month. Well, I don’t find out today for the first time that one can’t have one’s will & way in this world. Trollope told me you had been subjected to some vexatious treatment on the part of a periodical, which engaged to print a tale of yours and changed its mind. [2] I was very sorry—but you know something of the uncertainty of promises & arrangements. Go on with your novel [3] —there will be sure to be a welcome for it. I wonder whether you are at Florence in what must have been outrageous weather: the missing letter leaves me so forlornly ignorant of you! We left London on the 2d August—up to when it was, to my thinking cold rather than cool: and arrived in Paris to be really broiled: I read myself on a Fahrenheit thermometer in the Place Royale, one day at 2 oclock 96! We stayed a week—saw Miss Haworth whose journey to Spa had been delayed by headaches and other troubles—Mrs Bracken & Willy, of course,—and left on the 9th for Tours,—thence, next day to Nantes and this old place—where I find nothing altered. Willy & his mother have taken a house close by—they were to have arrived two days ago, but were prevented by the poor boy’s illness,—we expect them to-night. Pen is in perfect health,—swims daily a long way out into the sea—not yesterday, however, for a man sank and was all but drowned, and the business of saving and recovering him, in which Pen had a share, took away the zeal of the bathers for that occasion. Pen distinguished himself by remembering the Humane Society’s rules, [4] of which the people were ignorant,—and preventing their laying the body in unnatural ways, administering salts &c. He ran into a house, got brandy & vinegar, and on being directed by somebody to do some stupidity or other, bade him “Allez au diable!” [5] —so, you see, he promises. He is drawing a good deal, and reading a very little Virgil with me. My Father & Sister are perfectly well. For me, I bathe daily, write also, feel better than in London, & go very early to bed. It is very cool here—the effect of some tempest not very far off,—high wind, grey sky, un-august-like weather: tho’ it has been very hot, and all the grass is brown as rusty iron.
I had a letter from Story the other day—with all the news of dear Siena. I see by an article in a French Paper this morning, that, at the very latest, the Mont Cenis tunnel will be completed in five years. [6] What is it all to me, however? Something, perhaps, in my old age–
I wish I could tell you anything about people you know– Miss Haworth told me she had recently heard from you. I saw Mrs Lewes just before I came away. He told me she was much annoyed by criticisms on her “Romola”– They have taken a house; bought it, indeed,—in St John’s wood, [7] but intend to go to Rome this winter. I like her & him very much. Lytton’s novel [8] has been exactly the failure I expected. It is a fact, that he asked £1500 for it: I don’t believe it will pay printing: pity, pity! I also saw Miss Smith [9] to whom I & Pen are indeed indebted for her pains– I brought his last drawings to Paris, and highly satisfactory was their reception. I had a letter and a review [10] —(I think I told you of this)—from Kate Field—about whom Trollope told me something puzzling—of wedding-cards he had received from a “Kate Field,” who could hardly be other than ours, and yet, surely her letter would not be signed K. F. as usual, in that case! [11] Trollope also told me more of l’ami Jarves,—whom I take to be wholly unveracious, and utterly harmless: I believe his wife’s account entirely. From Mrs Bracken, I hear that Annette is very well, at Genoa, and that’s all. Another year gone by, poor girl! Mrs B. has sold her furniture, and goes to England after her six week’s sojourn here—it will be much the better for Willy, I think. Mrs B. lent me “Salammbò” [12] —don’t you remember my old, and still continuing passion for “Made Bovary?”– [13] If you have read this—as probably you have, my immense disappointment will be easily understood– I take nine-tenths of the “learning”—the historical touches &c to be pure humbug—“all made out of the carver’s brain.” I am reading too, with much milder disappointment Maurice de Guérin’s “Remains” [14] —limpid & deep as water in a tea-spoon, I find it: very good, & pretty, & true in its little way, but surely nothing to warrant this outcry of wonder & praise on every side: I like the notion of a deep thinker,—whose main subject of study is Lamennais, [15] —taking him for a model Catholic,—he who died detesting their doctrine: but it’s one thing to say pretty things about Swallows, roses, autumn &c and another to look an inch into men’s hearts. I have also got here some novels that I mean to read, besides books of my own,—so I shall get thro some six weeks more.
Dearest Isa, if there is any thing to say, won’t you say it to me here. My letters sent to London, stay there: I have nobody to inspect them, and there are probably fifty by this time, of very various importance. At all events, address the next letter to me here. I live upon milk & fruit—figs, chiefly: and send thoughts over sea and land even at the suggestion of a fig-skin! Give my love to all friends. How is Hatty, do you know? I saw Gibson at the Academy the day before I left—or two days. My sister & father, to whom I gave your kind message, thank you heartily and send their love. Pen’s love with that of Yours ever affectionately
Robert Browning.
Publication: DI, pp. 171–175.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. From a drawing of EBB as a child; see the third paragraph in letter 5206. The book is The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (1863). Thomas Adolphus Trollope was the conveyer. He had been in England since July (see The Letters of Anthony Trollope, ed. N. John Hall, Stanford, 1983, I, 226).
2. We have been unable to identify either the “periodical” or the “tale.”
3. Isa Blagden's next published novel was The Woman I Loved, and the Woman Who Loved Me (1865). However, since this was a reprint of the serialized version (see letter 5021, note 4), perhaps RB is thinking of the next work, Nora and Archibald Lee (1867).
4. The Royal Humane Society “was founded in England in 1774 for the purpose of rendering ‘first aid’ in cases of drowning and for restoring life by artificial means to those apparently drowned” (EB).
5. “Go to the devil.”
6. Work began on the Mont Cenis railroad tunnel, connecting Modane, France, to Bardonecchia, Italy, in 1857 and was completed in 1870. It opened for traffic the following year. “During the first four years of hand labour the average progress was not more than 9 in. per day on each side of the Alps,” but with the introduction of machine drilling in 1861 and later “compressed air rock-drills” the rate of progress was greatly increased. (EB).
7. The Priory, 21 North Bank, Regent’s Park. The Lewes’s bought the lease “for £2000 in August 1863” and moved in on 5 November (see The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 93 and 119).
8. The Ring of Amasis.
9. Jane Browning Smith.
11. Two months later, in a letter to Kate Field, T.A. Trollope wrote: “Do you know that we all got it into our heads that you were married. My brother received cards in an envelope,—Mr. and Mrs. Carrol—née (as the damned idiots will write in French) Kate P Field. He has no idea who could have sent them, and never knew any other Kate Field than you” (More Books: Being the Bulletin of the Boston Public Library, July 1927, p. 140).
12. Salammbô (1862) by Gustave Flaubert (1821–80), a novel set in 3rd-century-B.C. Carthage after the 1st Punic War.
13. Madame Bovary (1857); see letter 4299, note 16.
14. Maurice de Guérin (1810–39), French poet, published nothing in his lifetime. His works, collected and edited by G.S Trébutien, were published as Reliquiae (2 vols., 1861), with an introduction by Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–69). Matthew Arnold praised the work in a lecture that was subsequently printed in Fraser’s Magazine for January 1863 (pp. 47–61).
15. Félicité Robert de Lamennais (1782–1854); see letter 2332, note 7. Maurice de Guérin was educated for a life as a Catholic clergyman and studied “at the Collège Stanislas, Paris, after which he entered the society at La Chesnaye in Brittany, founded by Lamennais. It was only after great hesitation … that under the influence of Lamennais he joined the new religious order in the autumn of 1832; and when, in September of the next year, Lamennais, who had come under the displeasure of Rome, severed connexion with the society, Maurice de Guérin soon followed his example” (EB). Lamennais left the church shortly afterward and was never reconciled. Guérin turned to a secular life and married in 1838.
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