lustrate your biography of Barty Josselin; but as for
editing it, _vous plaisantez, mon ami; un amateur comme moi!_ who'll
edit the editor? _Quis custodiet?_...

"You're mistaken about Malines. I only got back there a week or two
before he left it. I remember often seeing him there, arm in arm
with his aunt, Lady Caroline Grey, and being told that he was a
_monsieur anglais, qui avait mal aux yeux_ (like me); but in
Duesseldorf, during the following winter, I knew him very well
indeed.

"We, and the others you tell me you mention, had a capital time in
Duesseldorf. I remember the beautiful Miss Royce they were all so mad
about, and also Miss Gibson, whom I admired much the most of the
two, although she wasn't quite so tall--you know my craze for lovely
giantesses.

"Josselin and I came to London at about the same time, and there
again I saw much of him, and was immensely attracted by him, of
course--as we all were, in the very pleasant little artistic clique
you tell me you describe; but somehow I was never very intimate with
him--none of us were, except, perhaps, Charles Keene.

"He went a great deal into smart society, and a little of the
guardsman still clung to him, and this was an unpardonable crime in
those Bohemian days.

"He was once seen walking between two well-known earls, in the
Burlington Arcade, arm in arm!

"Z---- (to whom a noble lord was as a red rag to a bull) all but cut
him for this, and we none of us approved of his swell friends,
Guardsmen and others. How we've all changed, especially Z----, who
hasn't missed a levee for twenty years, nor his wife a drawing-room!

"Josselin and I acted in a little French musical farce together at
Cornelys's; he had a charming voice and sang beautifully, as you
know.

"Then he married, and a year after I did the same; and though we
lived near each other for a little while, we didn't meet very often,
beyond dining together once or twice at each other's houses. They
lived very much in the world.

"It will be very difficult to draw his wife. I really think Mrs.
Josselin was the most beautiful woman I ever saw; but she used to be
very reserved in those early days, and I never felt quite at my ease
with her. I'm sure she was sweetness and kindness itself; she was
certainly charming at her own dinner-table,