“Paris, 14th December 1864.—You are really too good to have written to me, dear Madame Ernst, and I ought to reply in a sleek, smooth style, mouth nicely buttoned up, cravat well tied, myself all smiles and amiability. Well, I can’t!
“I am ill, miserable, disgusted, bored, idiotic, wearisome, cross, and altogether impossible. It is one of those days when I am in the sort of temper that I wish the earth were a charged bomb, that I might light the fuse for fun.
“The account of your Nice pleasures does not amuse me in the least.
“I should love to see you and your dear invalid, but I could not accept your offer of a room. I would rather live in the cave under the Ponchettes.
“There I could growl comfortably alongside Caliban (I know he lives there, I saw him one day), and the sea does not often come into it; whereas with friends, there are all sorts of unbearable attentions.
“They ask how you pass the night, but not how your ennui is getting on;[31] they laugh when you say silly things; are always mutely trying to find out whether you are sad or gay; they talk to you when you are only soliloquising, and then the husband says to the wife, ‘Do let him alone, don’t bother him,’ etc., etc. Then you feel a brute and go out, banging the door and feeling you have laid the train of a domestic quarrel.
“Now in Caliban’s grotto there is none of this.
“Well, never mind!
“You stroll on the terrace and along the shady walks? And then?
“You admire the sunsets? And then?