SD2369. George Eliot to Maria Congreve
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 349.
Rome
4–6 April 1860
… I feel some stirrings of the insurrectionary spirit myself when I see the red pantaloons at every turn in the streets of Rome. I suppose Mrs Browning could explain to me that this is part of the great idea nourished in the soul of the modern saviour Louis Napoleon, and that for the French to impose a hateful government on the Romans is the only proper sequence to the story of the French Revolution.
Text: The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven, Conn., 1954–78), 3, 286–289.
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