My business at Paris has been the old work of trying to get a passport on parole for Mr. Trench’s going to Ireland; or else permission for him to live here in the capital, instead of being confined to a miserable country town. I have little hope of success; but, like the spider, as soon as one of my webs is destroyed, I set about spinning another with undiminished activity.
I wish I could send you some of the many useful and pleasant objects of literature, taste, and agrément with which Paris abounds; but I can find no one who will take the smallest parcel to England. Indeed, at present I know no person going. I am therefore reduced to sending you a dry and vulgar hundred pounds, with which I beg you will buy something pretty, and fancy it is your mother’s choice.
I am delighted to find you have acquired such facility in writing, as I perceive in your letters, and that you take such pains to form your style. I believe there is no trouble more fully and frequently repaid, no expense of time which brings such immense interest in worldly profit and pleasure.
TO RICHARD TRENCH, ESQ.
Paris, Feb. 24, 1806.
Antoine procured us the best places possible to see the parade: a window, au premier, in apparently a private house, opposite the Tuileries, where there were none but what seemed very good company, and where Fred was extremely admired. He interests every creature who sees him. There are people who in youth have that gift, which I look at as separate and independent of every other merit, charm, or advantage; and it certainly contributes highly to happiness, and facilitates everything. I fancy it was that which Venus breathed over Æneas, or Ascanius—I forget which of them—in the Æneid; for I can never bring myself to think it was mere personal grace, which one supposes the descendants of the goddess must have possessed naturally, and which is too material a thing for the refined Virgil to have had only in his thoughts. I stayed with him there from before twelve till past four, dévorée d’ennui, except as I received pleasure from his: and, by the bye, it is a species of complaisance I never had for any other human being; for though I think I am complaisant (perhaps I am very much mistaken, like many others whom I have known entertain the same opinion of themselves, to which opinion they never made a convert), it is certainly not in that way, nor ever was; in spite of the lectures both of Baron Bretueil, and of another, whose judgment I more respected; who each of them used to tell me that in order to be a distingué person in any line, one must learn to bear ennui, and so conceal it under smiles. For the first time I saw, in the same room with him, a pair of eyes which rivalled his, belonging to a little nice interesting girl about eight years old. Hers were much darker, of the Indian, Portuguese, and Jew black, with jet eyebrows much pencilled and immense eyelashes. After due deliberation I gave his the preference, as more susceptible of variety of expression, and equally capable of mirth as of melancholy, whereas the jet kind can only mark the soft and serious passions.
I possess no continuous journal of my Mother’s during her constrained residence in France, though I believe she kept one. I have not found more than a few entries, made in a volume by themselves, and all referring to the death of the eldest child of her second marriage, mentioned more than once in the foregoing letters—then, indeed, its only child; for a daughter, subsequently born, had only lived a few days. The impression which this loss made, as will be seen by the many subsequent allusions to it, was profound and lasting.