ogress with his
famous fifth number, on the completion of which I was to join him. The
day at one time seemed doubtful. "It would be miserable to have to work
while you were here. Still, I make such sudden starts, and am so
possessed of what I am going to do, that the fear may prove to be quite
groundless, and if any alteration would trouble you, let the 13th stand
at all hazards." The cold he described as so intense, and the price of
fuel so enormous, that though the house was not half warmed ("as you'll
say, when you feel it") it cost him very near a pound a day.
Begging-letter writers had found out "Monsieur Dickens, le romancier
celebre," and waylaid him at the door and in the street as numerously as
in London: their distinguishing peculiarity being that they were nearly
all of them "Chevaliers de la Garde Imperiale de sa Majeste Napoleon le
Grand," and that their letters bore immense seals with coats of arms as
large as five-shilling pieces. His friends the Watsons passed new year's
day with him on their way to Rockingham from Lausanne, leaving that
country covered with snow and the Bise blowing cruelly over it, but
describing it as nothing to the cold of Paris. On the day that closed
the old year he had gone into the Morgue and seen an old man with grey
head lying there. "It seemed the strangest thing in the world that it
should have been necessary to take any trouble to stop such a feeble,
spent, exhausted morsel of life. It was just dusk when I went in; the
place was empty; and he lay there, all alone, like an impersonation of
the wintry eighteen hundred and forty-six. . . . I find I am getting
inimitable, so I'll stop."

The time for my visit having come, I had grateful proof of the minute
and thoughtful provision characteristic of him in everything. My dinner
had been ordered to the second at Boulogne, my place in the malle-poste
taken, and these and other services announced in a letter, which, by way
of doing its part also in the kindly work of preparation, broke out into
French. He never spoke that language very well, his accent being somehow
defective; but he practised himself into writing it with remarkable ease
and fluency. "I have written to the Hotel des Bains at Boulogne to send
on to Calais and take your place in the malle-poste. . . . Of course you
know that you'll be assailed with frightful shouts all along the two
lines of ropes from all the touters in Boulogne, and of course you'll
pass on like th