The ‘Siecle’ has for a feuilleton a new romance of Soulie’s, called ‘Saturnin Fichet,’ which is really not good, and tiresome to boot.  Robert and I began by each of us reading it, but after a little while he left me alone, being certain that no good could come of such a work.  So, of course, ever since, I have been exclaiming and exclaiming as to the wonderful improvement and increasing beauty and glory of it, just to justify myself, and to make him sorry for not having persevered!  The truth is, however, that but for obstinacy I should give up too.  Deplorably dull the story is, and there is a crowd of people each more indifferent than each, to you; the pith of the plot being (very characteristically) that the hero has somebody exactly like him.  To the reader, it’s all one in every sense—­who’s who, and what’s what.  Robert is a warm admirer of Balzac and has read most of his books, but certainly—­oh certainly—­he does not in a general way appreciate our French people quite with our warmth; he takes too high a standard, I tell him, and won’t listen to a story for a story’s sake.  I can bear to be amused, you know without a strong pull on my admiration.  So we have great wars sometimes, and I put up Dumas’ flag, or Soulie’s, or Eugene Sue’s (yet he was properly possessed by the ‘Mysteres de Paris’) and carry it till my arms ache.  The plays and vaudevilles he knows far more of than I do, and always maintains they are the happiest growth of the French school—­setting aside the masters, observe—­for Balzac and George Sand hold all their honours; and, before your letter came, he had told me about the ‘Kean’ and the other dramas.  Then we read together the other day the ‘Rouge et Noir,’ that powerful book of Stendhal’s (Beyle), and he thought it very striking, and observed—­what I had thought from the first and again and again—­that it was exactly like Balzac in the raw, in the material and undeveloped conception.  What a book it is really, and so full of pain and bitterness, and the gall of iniquity!  The new Dumas I shall see in time, perhaps, and it is curious that Robert had just been telling me the very story you speak of in your letter, from the ‘Causes Celebres.’  I never read it—­the more shame!  Dearest friend, all this talk of French books and no talk about you—­the most shame!  You don’t tell me enough of yourself, and I want to hear, because (besides the usual course of reasons) Mr. Chorley spoke of you as if you were not as cheerful as usual; do tell me.  Ah! if you fancy that I do not love you as near, through being so far, you are unjust to me as you never were before.  For myself, the brightness round me has had a cloud on it lately by an illness of poor Wilson’s....  She would not go to Dr. Cook till I was terrified one night, while she was undressing me, by her sinking down on the sofa in a shivering fit.  Oh, so frightened I was, and Robert ran out for a physician; and I could have shivered too, with the fright.  But she is