Her fear, however, proved mistaken.
The child's prattle amused the philosopher, and led him on one occasion
to say: 'Why, sir, you have as many aspirations as Napoleon!' At
Paris he would have been miserable without Mr. Browning's help, in his
ignorance of the language, and impatience of the discomforts which this
created for him. He couldn't ask for anything, he complained, but they
brought him the opposite.

On one occasion Mr. Carlyle made a singular remark. He was walking with
Mr. Browning, either in Paris or the neighbouring country, when they
passed an image of the Crucifixion; and glancing towards the figure of
Christ, he said, with his deliberate Scotch utterance, 'Ah, poor fellow,
_your_ part is played out!'

Two especially interesting letters are dated from the same address,
February 15 and April 7, 1852.

'. . . Beranger lives close to us, and Robert has seen him in his white
hat, wandering along the asphalte. I had a notion, somehow, that he was
very old, but he is only elderly--not much above sixty (which is the
prime of life, nowadays) and he lives quietly and keeps out of scrapes
poetical and political, and if Robert and I had a little less modesty we
are assured that we should find access to him easy. But we can't make
up our minds to go to his door and introduce ourselves as vagrant
minstrels, when he may probably not know our names. We could never
follow the fashion of certain authors, who send their books about with
intimations of their being likely to be acceptable or not--of which
practice poor Tennyson knows too much for his peace. If, indeed, a
letter of introduction to Beranger were vouchsafed to us from any benign
quarter, we should both be delighted, but we must wait patiently for
the influence of the stars. Meanwhile, we have at last sent our letter
[Mazzini's] to George Sand, accompanied with a little note signed by
both of us, though written by me, as seemed right, being the woman. We
half-despaired in doing this--for it is most difficult, it appears,
to get at her, she having taken vows against seeing strangers, in
consequence of various annoyances and persecutions, in and out of print,
which it's the mere instinct of a woman to avoid--I can understand it
perfectly. Also, she is in Paris for only a few days, and under a new
name, to escape from the plague of her notoriety. People said, "She will
never see you--you have no chance, I am afraid." But we determined
to try. At least I prick