What I wanted, in
my presumption, was that the object, the place, the person, the
unreduced impression, often doubtless so difficult or so impossible to
reduce, should give out to me something of a situation; living as I did
in confused and confusing situations and thus hooking them on, however
awkwardly, to almost any at all living surface I chanced to meet. My
memory of Boulogne is that we had almost no society of any sort at
home--there appearing to be about us but one sort, and that of far too
great, or too fearful, an immediate bravery. Yet there were occasional
figures that I recover from our scant circle and that I associate,
whatever links I may miss, with the small still houses on the rampart;
figures of the quaintest, quite perhaps the frowsiest, little English
ladies in such mushroom hats, such extremely circular and bestriped
scarlet petticoats, such perpetual tight gauntlets, such explicit
claims to long descent, which showed them for everything that everyone
else at Boulogne was not. These mid-Victorian samples of a perfect
consistency "represented," by my measure, as hard as ever they
could--and represented, of all things, literature and history and
society. The literature was that of the three-volume novel, then, and
for much after, enjoying its loosest and serenest spread; for they
separately and anxiously and awfully "wrote"--and that must almost by
itself have amounted in them to all the history I evoked.

The dreary months, as I am content that in their second phase especially
they should be called, are subject, I repeat, to the perversion, quite
perhaps to the obscuration, of my temporarily hindered health--which
should keep me from being too sure of these small _proportions_ of
experience--I was to look back afterwards as over so grey a desert;
through which, none the less, there flush as sharp little certainties,
not to be disallowed, such matters as the general romance of Merridew,
the English Librarian, before mentioned, at the mouth of the Port; a
connection that thrusts itself upon me now as after all the truest
centre of my perceptions--waylaying my steps at the time, as I came and
went, more than any other object or impression. The question of what
_that_ spot represented, or could be encouraged, could be aided and
abetted, to represent, may well have supremely engaged me--for depth
within depth there could only open before me. The place "meant," on
these terms, to begin with, frank and lic