paining one another,
since _you_ have pained _me_. See what a deep wound I must have in me,
to be pained by the touch of such a hand. Oh, I am morbid, I very well
know. But the truth is that I have been miserably upset by your book,
and that if I had had the least imagination of your intending to touch
upon certain biographical details in relation to me, I would have
conjured you by your love to me and by my love to you, to forbear it
altogether. You cannot understand; no, you cannot understand with all
your wide sympathy (perhaps, because you are not morbid, and I am), the
sort of susceptibility I have upon one subject. I have lived heart to
heart (for instance) with my husband these five years: I have never yet
spoken out, in a whisper even, what is in me; never yet could find heart
or breath; never yet could bear to hear a word of reference from his
lips. And now those dreadful words are going the round of the
newspapers, to be verified here, commented on there, gossiped about
everywhere; and I, for my part, am frightened to look at a paper as a
child in the dark--as unreasonably, you will say--but what then? what
drives us mad is our unreason. I will tell you how it was. First of all,
an English acquaintance here told us that she had been hearing a lecture
at the College de France, and that the professor, M. Philaret Chasles,
in the introduction to a series of lectures on English poetry, had
expressed his intention of noticing Tennyson, Browning, &c., and
E.B.B.--'from whose private life the veil had been raised in so
interesting a manner lately by Miss Mitford.' In the midst of my anxiety
about this, up comes a writer of the 'Revue des Deux Mondes' to my
husband, to say that he was preparing a review upon me and had been
directed by the editor to make use of some biographical details
extracted from your book into the 'Athenaeum,' but that it had occurred
to him doubtfully whether certain things might not be painful to me, and
whether I might not prefer their being omitted in his paper. (All this
time we had seen neither book nor 'Athenaeum.') Robert answered for me
that the omission of such and such things would be much preferred by me,
and accordingly the article appears in the 'Revue' with the passage from
your book garbled and curtailed as seemed best to the quoter. Then
Robert set about procuring the 'Athenaeum' in question. He tells me (and
_that_ I perfectly believe) that, for the facts to be given at all, they