[Paris], 138 Avenue des Champs-Elysées:
June 16, [1852].
My first word must be to thank you, my dearest kind friend, for your affectionate words to me and mine, which always, from you, sink deeply. It was, on my part, great gratification to see you and talk to you and hear you talk, and, above all, perhaps, to feel that you loved me still a little. May God bless you both! And may we meet again and again in Paris and elsewhere; in London this summer to begin with! As the Italians would say in relation to any like pleasure: 'Sarebbe una benedizione.'
We are waiting for the English weather to be reported endurable in order to set out. Mrs. Streatfield, who has been in England these twelve days, writes to certify that it is past the force of a Parisian imagination to imagine the state of the skies and the atmosphere; yet, even in Paris, we have been moaning the last four days, because really, since then, we have gone back to April, and a rather cool April, with alternate showers and sunshine—a crisis, however, which does not call for fires, nor inflict much harm on me. It was the thunder, we think, that upset the summer.
You seem to have had a sort of inkling about my brittleness when you were here. It was the beginning of a bad attack of cough and pain in the side, the consequence of which was that I turned suddenly into the likeness of a ghost and frightened Robert from his design of going to England. About that I am by no means regretful; he was not wanted, as the event proved abundantly. The worst was that he was annoyed by the number of judicious observers and miserable comforters who told him I was horribly changed and ought to be taken back to Italy forthwith. I knew it was nothing but an accidental attack, and that the results would pass away, as they did. I kept quiet, applied mustard poultices, and am now looking again (tell dear Mr. Martin) 'as if I had shammed.' So all these misfortunes are strictly historical, you are to understand. To-night we are going to Ary Scheffer's to hear music and to see ever so many celebrities. Oh, and let me remember to tell you that M. Thierry, the blind historian, has sent us a message by his physician to ask us to go to see him, and as a matter of course we go. Madame Viardot, the prima donna, and Leonard, the first violin player at the Conservatoire, are to be at M. Scheffer's.
After all, you are too right. The less amused I am, clearly the better for me. I should live ever so many years more by being shut up in a hermitage, if it were warm and dry. More's the pity, when one wants to see and hear as I do. The only sort of excitement and fatigue which does me no harm, but good, is travelling. The effect of the continual change of air is to pour in oil as the lamp burns; so I explain the extraordinary manner in which I bear the fatigue of being four-and-twenty hours together in a diligence, for instance, which many strong women would feel too much for them.
All this talking of myself when I want to talk of you and to tell you how touched I was by the praises of your winning little Letitia! Enclosed is a note to Chapman & Hall which will put her 'bearer' (if she can find one in London) in possession of the two volumes in question. I shall like her to have them, and she must try to find my love, as the King of France did the poison (a 'most unsavoury simile,' certainly), between the leaves. I send with them, in any case, my best love. Ah, so sorry I am that she has suffered from the weather you have had. She is a most interesting child, and of a nature which is rare....
Robert's warm regards, with those of your
Ever affectionate and grateful
Ba.