[127] Writing on Sunday he had said: "I hope to finish the second number to-morrow, and to send it off bodily by Tuesday's post. On Wednesday I purpose, please God, beginning the Battle of Life. I shall peg away at that, without turning aside to Dombey again; and if I can only do it within the month!" I had to warn him, on receiving these intimations, that he was trying too much.
[128] The storm of rain formerly mentioned by him had not been repeated, but the weather had become unsettled, and he thus referred to the rainfall which made that summer so disastrous in England. "What a storm that must have been in London! I wish we could get something like it, here. . . . It is thundering while I write, but I fear it don't look black enough for a clearance. The echoes in the mountains are of such a stupendous sort, that a peal of thunder five or ten minutes long, is here the commonest of circumstances. . . ." That was early in August, and at the close of the month he wrote: "I forgot to tell you that yesterday week, at half-past 7 in the morning, we had a smart shock of an earthquake, lasting, perhaps, a quarter of a minute. It awoke me in bed. The sensation was so curious and unlike any other, that I called out at the top of my voice I was sure it was an earthquake."
[129] "I may tell you," he wrote to me from Paris at the end of November, "now it is all over. I don't know whether it was the hot summer, or the anxiety of the two new books coupled with D. N. remembrances and reminders, but I was in that state in Switzerland, when my spirits sunk so, I felt myself in serious danger. Yet I had little pain in my side; excepting that time at Genoa I have hardly had any since poor Mary died, when it came on so badly; and I walked my fifteen miles a day constantly, at a great pace."
[130] It had also the mention of another floating fancy for the weekly periodical which was still and always present to his mind, and which settled down at last, as the reader knows, into Household Words. "As to the Review, I strongly incline to the notion of a kind of Spectator (Addison's)—very cheap, and pretty frequent. We must have it thoroughly discussed. It would be a great thing to found something. If the mark between a sort of Spectator, and a different sort of Athenæum, could be well hit, my belief is that a deal might be done. But it should be something with a marked and distinctive and obvious difference, in its design, from any other existing periodical."
[131] Some smaller items of family news were in the same letter. "Mamey and Katey have come out in Parisian dresses, and look very fine. They are not proud, and send their loves. Skittles is cutting teeth, and gets cross towards evening. Frankey is smaller than ever, and Walter very large. Charley in statu quo. Everything is enormously dear. Fuel, stupendously so. In airing the house, we burnt five pounds' worth of firewood in one week!! We mix it with coal now, as we used to do in Italy, and find the fires much warmer. To warm the house thoroughly, this singular habitation requires fires on the ground floor. We burn three. . . ."
[132] "I shall bring the Brave, though I have no use for him. He'd die if I didn't."
[133] Dickens's first letter after my return described it to me. "Do you remember my writing a letter to the prefet of police about that coachman? I heard no more about it until this very day" (12th of February), "when, at the moment of your letter arriving, Roche put his head in at the door (I was busy writing in the Baronial drawing-room) and said, 'Here is datter cocher!'—Sir, he had been in prison ever since! and being released this morning, was sent by the police to pay back the franc and a half, and to beg pardon, and to get a certificate that he had done so, or he could not go on the stand again! Isn't this admirable? But the culminating point of the story (it could happen with nobody but me) is that he was drunk when he came!! Not very, but his eye was fixed, and he swayed in his sabots, and smelt of wine, and told Roche incoherently that he wouldn't have done it (committed the offence, that is) if the people hadn't made him. He seemed to be troubled with a phantasmagorial belief that all Paris had gathered round us that night in the Rue St. Honoré, and urged him on with frantic shouts. . . . Snow, frost, and cold. . . . The Duke of Bordeaux is very well, and dines at the Tuileries to-morrow. . . . When I have done, I will write you a brilliant letter. . . . Loves from all. . . . Your blue and golden bed looks desolate." The allusion to the Duc de Bordeaux was to remind me pleasantly of a slip of his own during our talk with Chateaubriand, when, at a loss to say something interesting to the old royalist, he bethought him to enquire with sympathy when he had last seen the representative of the elder branch of Bourbons, as if he were resident in the city then and there!
[134] This was on Sunday, the 21st of February, when a party were assembled of whom I think the French Emperor, his cousin the Prince Napoleon, Doctor Quin, Dickens's eldest son, and myself, are now the only survivors. Lady Blessington had received the day before from her brother Major Power, who held a military appointment in Hobart Town, a small oil-painting of a girl's face by the murderer Wainewright (mentioned on a former page as having been seen by us together in Newgate), who was among the convicts there under sentence of transportation, and who had contrived somehow to put the expression of his own wickedness into the portrait of a nice kind-hearted girl. Major Power knew nothing of the man's previous history at this time, and had employed him on the painting out of a sort of charity. As soon as the truth went back, Wainewright was excluded from houses before open to him, and shortly after died very miserably. What Reynolds said of portrait painting, to explain its frequent want of refinement, that a man could only put into a face what he had in himself, was forcibly shown in this incident. The villain's story altogether moved Dickens to the same interest as it had excited in another profound student of humanity (Sir Edward Lytton), and, as will be seen, he also introduced him into one of his later writings.
[135] ". . . I am horrified to find that the first chapter makes at least two pages less than I had supposed, and I have a terrible apprehension that there will not be copy enough for the number! As it could not possibly come out short, and as there would be no greater possibility of sending to me, in this short month, to supply what may be wanted, I decide—after the first burst of nervousness is gone—to follow this letter by Diligence to-morrow morning. The malle poste is full for days and days. I shall hope to be with you some time on Friday." C. D. to J. F. Paris: Wednesday, 17th February, 1847.
[136] "He had already laid his hand upon the bell-rope to convey his usual summons to Richards, when his eye fell upon a writing-desk, belonging to his deceased wife, which had been taken, among other things, from a cabinet in her chamber. It was not the first time that his eye had lighted on it. He carried the key in his pocket; and he brought it to his table and opened it now—having previously locked the room door—with a well accustomed hand.