rting for London, and
will take it by the month, both because that is the cheapest way, and
because desirable places don't let for shorter terms.

I have been sitting to Scheffer to-day--conceive this, if you please,
with No. 5 upon my soul--four hours!! I am so addleheaded and bored,
that if you were here, I should propose an instantaneous rush to the
Trois Freres. Under existing circumstances I have no consolation.

I think THE portrait[23] is the most astounding thing ever beheld upon
this globe. It has been shrieked over by the united family as "Oh! the
very image!" I went down to the _entresol_ the moment I opened it, and
submitted it to the Plorn--then engaged, with a half-franc musket, in
capturing a Malakhoff of chairs. He looked at it very hard, and gave it
as his opinion that it was Misser Hegg. We suppose him to have
confounded the Colonel with Jollins. I met Madame Georges Sand the other
day at a dinner got up by Madame Viardot for that great purpose. The
human mind cannot conceive any one more astonishingly opposed to all my
preconceptions. If I had been shown her in a state of repose, and asked
what I thought her to be, I should have said: "The Queen's monthly
nurse." _Au reste_, she has nothing of the _bas bleu_ about her, and is
very quiet and agreeable.

The way in which mysterious Frenchmen call and want to embrace me,
suggests to any one who knows me intimately, such infamous lurking,
slinking, getting behind doors, evading, lying--so much mean resort to
craven flights, dastard subterfuges, and miserable poltroonery--on my
part, that I merely suggest the arrival of cards like this:

[Illustration: HW:

Horgues
homme de lettres
or
Drouse
membre de l'Institut
or
Cregibus Patalanternois
Ecole des Beaux arts

--every five minutes. Books also arrive with, on the flyleaf,

Jaubaud
Hommage a l'illustre romancier d'Angleterre

Charles De Kean.]

--and I then write letters of terrific _empressement_, with assurances
of all sorts of profound considerations, and never by any chance become
visible to the naked eye.

At the Porte St. Martin they are doing the "Orestes," put into French
verse by Alexandre Dumas. Really one of the absurdest things I ever saw.
The scene of the tomb, with all manner of classical females, in black,
grouping themselves on the lid, and on the steps, and on each other, and
in every conceivable aspect of obtrusive impossibility, is just like the
w