Love to all. By-by!
Your loving
Lu.
No news except through N., who yesterday sent me a nice letter with July account of $6,212,–a neat little sum for "the Alcotts, who can't make money!" With $10,000 well invested, and more coming in all the time, I think we may venture to enjoy ourselves, after the hard times we have all had.
The cream of the joke is, that we made our own money ourselves, and no one gave us a blessed penny. That does soothe my rumpled soul so much that the glory is not worth thinking of.
To Anna.
Dinan, June 4, 1870.
The present excitement is the wood which Coste is having put in. Loads keep coming in queer, heavy carts drawn by four horses each, and two men to work the machine. Two men chop the great oak stumps, and a woman puts it in down cellar by the armful. The men get two francs a day,–forty cents! (Wouldn't our $3 a day workmen howl at that sort of wages!) When several carts arrive at once the place is a lively scene. Just now there were three carts and twelve horses, and eight were all up in a snarl, while half-a-dozen ladies stood at their doors and gave advice. One had a half-dressed baby in her arms; one a lettuce she was washing; another her distaff; and a fourth her little bowl of soup, which she ate at on the sidewalk, in the intervals gesticulating so frantically that her sabots rattled on the stones. The horses had a free fight, and the man couldn't seem to manage one big one, who romped about like a wild elephant, till the lady with the baby suddenly set the half-naked cherub on the doorsteps, charged in among the rampant beasts, and, by some magic howl or jerk, brought the bad horse to order, when she quietly returned to her baby, who had sat placidly eating dirt, and with a calm Voilà, messieurs, she skipped little Jean into his shirt, and the men sat down to smoke.
We are now in great excitement over Gaston, who has lately become so very amiable that we don't know him. We began by letting the spoiled child severely alone. This treatment worked well, and now he offers us things at table, bows when we enter, and to-day presented us with green tulips, violet shrubs, and queer medals all round. We have let little bits of news leak out about us, and they think we are dukes and duchesses in Amérique, and pronounce us très spirituelles; très charmantes; très seductives femmes. We laugh in private, and are used to having the entire company rise when we enter, and embrace us with ardor, listen with uplifted hands and shrieks of mon Dieu! grand ciel! etc., to all remarks, and point us out in public as les dames Américaines. Such is fame!