When _Men and Women_ was published in the autumn of 1855 the Brownings were again in Paris. An impulsive friend had taken an apartment for them in the Rue de Grenelle, facing east, and in all that concerned comfort splendidly mendacious. After some weeks of misery and illness Mrs Browning was conveyed to less glittering but more hospitable rooms in the Rue du Colisée by a desperate husband--"That darling Robert carried me into the carriage, swathed past possible breathing, over face and respirator in woollen shawls. No, he wouldn't set me down even to walk up the fiacre steps, but shoved me in upside down in a struggling bundle."[70] Happily the winter was of a miraculous mildness. Mrs Browning worked _Aurora Leigh_ in "a sort of _furia_," and Browning set himself to the task--a fruitless one as it proved--of rehandling and revising _Sordello_: "I lately gave time and pains," he afterwards told Milsand in his published dedication of the poem, "to turn my work into what the many might,--instead of what the few must--like: but after all I imagined another thing at first, and therefore leave as I find it"--proud but warrantable words. Some of his leisure was given to vigorous and not unsuccessful efforts in drawing. At the theatre he saw Ristori as Medea and admired her, but with qualifications. At Monckton Milnes's dinner-table he met Mignet and Cavour, and George Sand crowned with an ivy-wreath and "looking like herself." Mrs Browning records with pleasure that her husband's hostility to the French government had waned; at least he admitted that he was sick of the Opposition.