ere a day late in
getting to our hotel here."

They were in Paris when that was written; at the hotel Brighton; which
they had reached in the evening of Friday the 20th of November.

FOOTNOTES:

[129] "I may tell you," he wrote to me from Paris at the end of
November, "now it is all over. I don't know whether it was the hot
summer, or the anxiety of the two new books coupled with D. N.
remembrances and reminders, but I was in that state in Switzerland, when
my spirits sunk so, I felt myself in serious danger. Yet I had little
pain in my side; excepting that time at Genoa I have hardly had any
since poor Mary died, when it came on so badly; and I walked my fifteen
miles a day constantly, at a great pace."

CHAPTER XV.

THREE MONTHS IN PARIS.

1846-1847.

Lord Brougham--French Sunday--A House
taken--His French Abode--A Former
Tenant--Sister Fanny's Illness--The King of the
Barricades--The Morgue--Parisian
Population--Americans and French--Unsettlement
of Plans--A True Friend--Hard Frost--Alarming
Neighbour--A Fellow-litterateur--London
Visit--Return to
Paris--Begging-letter-writers--A Boulogne
Reception--French-English--Citizen
Dickens--Sight-seeing--Evening with Victor
Hugo--At the Bibliotheque Royale--Adventure
with a Coachman--Illness of Eldest Son--Visit
of his Father--The "Man that put together
Dombey."

NO man enjoyed brief residence in a hotel more than Dickens, but
"several tons of luggage, other tons of servants, and other tons of
children" are not desirable accompaniments to this kind of life; and his
first day in Paris did not close before he had offered for an "eligible
mansion." That same Saturday night he took a "colossal" walk about the
city, of which the brilliancy and brightness almost frightened him; and
among other things that attracted his notice was "rather a good book
announced in a bookseller's window as _Les Mysteres de Londres par Sir
Trollopp_. Do you know him?" A countryman better known had given him
earlier greeting. "The first man who took hold of me in the street,
immediately outside this door, was Bruffum in his check trousers, and
without the proper number of buttons on his shirt, who was going away
this morning, he told me, but coming back in two months, when we would
go and dine--at some place known to him and fame."

Next day he took another lon