To the Same.
Paris, 3 May, 1873.
I shall arrive Monday night, and have taken a chamber at the Queen’s Hotel, which is described to me as “somewhere behind the Burlington Arcade,” which is tolerably central. I shall not think of billeting myself on you, especially as you are not yet fairly settled. But I wish to see as much of you as may be. I must see your new nest as I did the old one, for that was a great satisfaction to me, and I recall it often in fancy. I must make the acquaintance of Miss Laura, too, in whom I feel an added interest now that I have got my step, and am a grandfather.[53] You would laugh at the number of perambulators (as they call baby-wagons nowadays) and ponies that I have bought for that wonderful boy, as I lie awake at night and hear the tramp of the sergent de ville under my windows. I have carried him through college so many times, that he must be a prodigy of learning by this time. I do not know whether I ought to betray it even to you, but he has more than once shown a tendency to be fast, though I have reclaimed him. I am quite sure he is steady now, and does not drink more than is good for him. That story of the police court was much exaggerated.
I don’t wonder that you feel sad at the thought of losing the Nortons. They have been and are more to me than I can tell. But you will see them all again, when you come to make your visit to me, which I look upon as pledged. It is as easy to get to us as to Switzerland, and you shall sleep now and then in the ice-chest to make you comfortable. The roof of the barn is pretty slippery and the ground below hard enough to give you a smart Alpine shock. By the way, what you say about Switzerland in July delights me. Remember that my address is always to the care of the Barings, and let me know where you are to be and when. I have a sort of glimmering of Lausanne, where I could exist cheaply, for though on pleasure I am bent, I am forced to have a frugal mind. But I am more and more convinced that a man (especially a grandfather) is most comfortable when he has worn his ruts deepest, and I should fly over the deep to-morrow if I could. It is ignoble, but it is true. I always hated the sights qu’il faut voir, and now there is no hope of strangeness anywhere. Man is a most uninventive animal—you scratch through the nationality and there he is underneath—the very bore you were running away from. However, I am rested and grown so stout that I have positively had to let out a reef in my trousers.
I reckon on a very jolly time in London, because I shall always be in the tremor of going away—though I am almost sorry that I am going when I think of saying good-by to the Nortons. I am sorry you did not see more of Emerson; he is good to love, and if his head be sometimes in thin and difficult air, his heart never is. He must have left London, then? Gay told me he met you at the Nortons, and kept calling you Stevens, and I irascibly correcting him as I would a vicious proofsheet. I don’t know why, but I am always exasperated when anybody pluralizes you. Whether it is that I hold you to be unique, or that I was once cheated by a man named Stevens, I can’t tell. However, Gay is a good fellow and a good artist for all that. Why is it that people do so? They always call Child Childs in the same fashion.
My eyes gave out some time ago, so I will only say that I shall go straight to Cleveland Place Tuesday morning, and if you dropt in on your way down town, it would be the best possible world so long as it lasted.
To C. E. Norton.
(Passenger by “Olympus.”)
Paris, 13 May, 1873.
I am so wont to carry Home about with me and to say “here,” when I mean Cambridge, even in Paris, that I did not fairly realize to myself that you were all going away till I was meditating over my pipe on board the Channel steamer. I made up my mind that I would fling an old shoe after you in the shape of a good-by that should surprise you after you were fairly embarked. I need not say how happy my three days with you in London were, nor how sweet it was to renew the old, old friendship with you all. We don’t make new friends, at least not in the same sense, for it is the privilege of old friendship that it knows all our weaknesses and accounts for them beforehand, taking almost a kind of pleasure in them as we do in bad weather that we have prophesied.
I wish I could have gone with you to Oxford, but Fanny was so happy at seeing me a day sooner than she expected that I was glad I didn’t. However, I made a memorandum never to leave her behind again in future.... They had taken good care of her while I was away, for somehow or other everybody in the house is fond of her.