and Voltaire's note upon
Frederick of Prussia's letter. Nor should I omit that in what Dickens
then told me, of even his small experience of the social aspects of
Paris, there seemed but the same disease which raged afterwards through
the second Empire. Not many days after I left, all Paris was crowding to
the sale of a lady of the demi-monde, Marie du Plessis, who had led the
most brilliant and abandoned of lives, and left behind her the most
exquisite furniture and the most voluptuous and sumptuous bijouterie.
Dickens wished at one time to have pointed the moral of this life and
death of which there was great talk in Paris while we were together. The
disease of satiety, which only less often than hunger passes for a
broken heart, had killed her. "What do you want?" asked the most famous
of the Paris physicians, at a loss for her exact complaint. At last she
answered: "To see my mother." She was sent for; and there came a simple
Breton peasant-woman clad in the quaint garb of her province, who prayed
by her bed until she died. Wonderful was the admiration and sympathy;
and it culminated when Eugene Sue bought her prayer-book at the sale.
Our last talk before I quitted Paris, after dinner at the Embassy, was
of the danger underlying all this, and of the signs also visible
everywhere of the Napoleon-worship which the Orleanists themselves had
most favoured. Accident brought Dickens to England a fortnight later,
when again we met together, at Gore-house, the self-contained reticent
man whose doubtful inheritance was thus rapidly preparing to fall to
him.[134]

The accident was the having underwritten his number of _Dombey_ by two
pages, which there was not time to supply otherwise than by coming to
London to write them.[135] This was done accordingly; but another
greater trouble followed. He had hardly returned to Paris when his
eldest son, whom I had brought to England with me and placed in the
house of Doctor Major, then head-master of King's-college-school, was
attacked by scarlet fever; and this closed prematurely Dickens's
residence in Paris. But though he and his wife at once came over, and
were followed after some days by the children and their aunt, the
isolation of the little invalid could not so soon be broken through. His
father at last saw him, nearly a month before the rest, in a lodging in
Albany-street, where his grandmother, Mrs. Hogarth, had devoted herself
to the charge of him; and an incident of the vis