Madame Garschine is ill, I am sorry to say, and was confined to bed all yesterday, which made a great difference to our little society. À propos of which, what keeps me here is just precisely the said society. These people are so nice and kind and intelligent, and then as I shall never see them any more I have a disagreeable feeling about making the move. With ordinary people in England, you have more or less chance of re-encountering one another; at least you may see their death in the papers; but with these people, they die for me and I die for them when we separate.
Andrew Lang, O you of little comprehension, called on Colvin.
You had not told me before about the fatuous person who thought Roads like Ruskin—surely the vaguest of contemporaneous humanity. Again my letter writing is of an enfeebled sort.—Ever your affectionate son,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson
[Menton], March 1st, 1874.
MY DEAR MOTHER,—The weather is again beautiful, soft, warm, cloudy and soft again, in provincial sense. Very interesting, I find Robertson; and Dugald Stewart’s life of him a source of unquenchable laughter. Dugald Stewart is not much better than McCrie,[12] and puts me much in mind of him. By the way, I want my father to find out whether any more of Knox’s Works was ever issued than the five volumes, as I have them. There are some letters that I am very anxious to see, not printed in any of the five, and perhaps still in MS.
I suppose you are now home again in Auld Reekie: that abode of bliss does not much attract me yet a bit.
Colvin leaves at the end of this week, I fancy.