My dear Miss Haworth,--I do hope you have not set us quite on the outside of your heart with the unfeeling and ungrateful. I say 'us' when I ought to have said 'me,' for you have known Robert, and you have not known _me_, and I am naturally less safe with you than he is--less safe in your esteem. We should both have gone to inquire after your health if he had not been attacked with influenza, and unfit for anything until the days you mentioned as the probable term of your remaining in town had passed. I waited till he should be better, and the malady lingered. Now he is well, and I do hope you may be so too. May it be! Bear us in mind and love, for we go away to-morrow to Paris--where, however, we shall _expect_ you before long. Thank you, thank you, for the books. I have been struck and charmed with some things in the 'Companion'--especially, may I say, with the 'Modern Pygmalion,' which catches me on my weak side of the _love of wonder_. By the way, what am I to say of Swedenborg and mesmerism? So much I could--the books have so drawn and held me (as far as I was capable of being drawn or held, in this chaos of London)--that I will not speak at all. The note-page is too small--the haste I write in, too great. God bless you, and good bye. Robert bids me give you his love (of the earnestest), and I have leave from you (have I not?) to be always affectionately yours, ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. * * * * * The journey to Paris was effected at the end of September, and for about nine months they pitched their tent at No. 138 Avenue des Champs-Elysées. It was a fortunate time to be in Paris for those who had no personal nervousness, and liked to be near the scene of great events--a most anxious time for any who were alarmed at disturbances, or took keenly to heart the horrors of street fighting. Fortunately for the Brownings, they, whether by temperament or through their Italian experiences, were not unduly disturbed at revolutions, while the horrors of Louis Napoleon's _coup d'état_ were, no doubt, only partly known to Mrs. Browning at the time, and were palliated to her by the view she took of Napoleon's character. She had not, it is true, raised him as yet to the pinnacle on which his intervention on behalf of Italy subsequently caused her to place him, but (perhaps owing to what Mr. Kenyon called her 'immoral sympathy with power') she was always disposed to put a favourable construction on his actions, and the _coup d'état_ was finally whitewashed for her by the approbation which the _plébiscite_ of December 20 gave to his assumption of supreme power. Her views are, however, so fully set forth in her own letters that they need not be detailed here. For her husband's opinion of the character of Louis Napoleon, at least as it appeared to him when looking back after the lapse of years, it is only necessary to refer to 'Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.' * * * * * _To Mrs. Jameson_