Volume Iii Part 71 (1/2)
There is a fete here to-night in honour of the Imperial baptism, and there will be another to-morrow. The Plorn has put on two bits of ribbon (one pink and one blue), which he calls ”companys,” to celebrate the occasion. The fact that the receipts of the fetes are to be given to the sufferers by the late floods reminds me that you will find at the pa.s.sport office a tin-box, condescendingly and considerately labelled in English:
FOR THE OVERFLOWINGS,
which the chief officer clearly believes to mean, for the sufferers from the inundations.
I observe more Mingles in the laundresses' shops, and one inscription, which looks like the name of a duet or chorus in a playbill, ”Here they mingle.”
Will you congratulate Mrs. Lemon, with our loves, on her gallant victory over the recreant cabman?
Walter has turned up, rather brilliant on the whole; and that (with shoals of remembrances and messages which I don't deliver) is all my present intelligence.
Ever affectionately.
[Sidenote: Mr. Mark Lemon.]
H. W. OFFICE, _July 2nd, 1856._
MY DEAR MARK,
I am concerned to hear that you are ill, that you sit down before fires and s.h.i.+ver, and that you have stated times for doing so, like the demons in the melodramas, and that you mean to take a week to get well in.
Make haste about it, like a dear fellow, and keep up your spirits, because I have made a bargain with Stanny and Webster that they shall come to Boulogne to-morrow week, Thursday the 10th, and stay a week. And you know how much pleasure we shall all miss if you are not among us--at least for some part of the time.
If you find any unusually light appearance in the air at Brighton, it is a distant refraction (I have no doubt) of the gorgeous and s.h.i.+ning surface of Tavistock House, now transcendently painted. The theatre part.i.tion is put up, and is a work of such terrific solidity, that I suppose it will be dug up, ages hence, from the ruins of London, by that Australian of Macaulay's who is to be impressed by its ashes. I have wandered through the spectral halls of the Tavistock mansion two nights, with feelings of the profoundest depression. I have breakfasted there, like a criminal in Pentonville (only not so well). It is more like Westminster Abbey by midnight than the lowest-spirited man--say you at present for example--can well imagine.
There has been a wonderful robbery at Folkestone, by the new manager of the Pavilion, who succeeded Giovannini. He had in keeping 16,000 of a foreigner's, and bolted with it, as he supposed, but in reality with only 1,400 of it. The Frenchman had previously bolted with the whole, which was the property of his mother. With him to England the Frenchman brought a ”lady,” who was, all the time and at the same time, endeavouring to steal all the money from him and bolt with it herself.
The details are amazing, and all the money (a few pounds excepted) has been got back.
They will be full of sympathy and talk about you when I get home, and I shall tell them that I send their loves beforehand. They are all enclosed. The moment you feel hearty, just write me that word by post. I shall be so delighted to receive it.
Ever, my dear Boy, your affectionate Friend.
[Sidenote: Mr. Walter Savage Landor.]
VILLA DES MOULINEAUX, BOULOGNE, _Sat.u.r.day Evening, July 5th, 1856._
MY DEAR LANDOR,
I write to you so often in my books, and my writing of letters is usually so confined to the numbers that I _must_ write, and in which I have no kind of satisfaction, that I am afraid to think how long it is since we exchanged a direct letter. But talking to your namesake this very day at dinner, it suddenly entered my head that I would come into my room here as soon as dinner should be over, and write, ”My dear Landor, how are you?” for the pleasure of having the answer under your own hand. That you _do_ write, and that pretty often, I know beforehand.
Else why do I read _The Examiner_?
We were in Paris from October to May (I perpetually flying between that city and London), and there we found out, by a blessed accident, that your G.o.dson was horribly deaf. I immediately consulted the princ.i.p.al physician of the Deaf and Dumb Inst.i.tution there (one of the best aurists in Europe), and he kept the boy for three months, and took unheard-of pains with him. He is now quite recovered, has done extremely well at school, has brought home a prize in triumph, and will be eligible to ”go up” for his India examination soon after next Easter.
Having a direct appointment, he will probably be sent out soon after he has pa.s.sed, and so will fall into that strange life ”up the country,”
before he well knows he is alive, which indeed seems to be rather an advanced stage of knowledge.
And there in Paris, at the same time, I found Marguerite Power and Little Nelly, living with their mother and a pretty sister, in a very small, neat apartment, and working (as Marguerite told me) hard for a living. All that I saw of them filled me with respect, and revived the tenderest remembrances of Gore House. They are coming to pa.s.s two or three weeks here for a country rest, next month. We had many long talks concerning Gore House, and all its bright a.s.sociations; and I can honestly report that they hold no one in more gentle and affectionate remembrance than you. Marguerite is still handsome, though she had the smallpox two or three years ago, and bears the traces of it here and there, by daylight. Poor little Nelly (the quicker and more observant of the two) shows some little tokens of a broken-off marriage in a face too careworn for her years, but is a very winning and sensible creature.
We are expecting Mary Boyle too, shortly.
I have just been propounding to Forster if it is not a wonderful testimony to the homely force of truth, that one of the most popular books on earth has nothing in it to make anyone laugh or cry? Yet I think, with some confidence, that you never did either over any pa.s.sage in ”Robinson Crusoe.” In particular, I took Friday's death as one of the least tender and (in the true sense) least sentimental things ever written. It is a book I read very much; and the wonder of its prodigious effect on me and everyone, and the admiration thereof, grows on me the more I observe this curious fact.