He came here
with a wife and a beloved daughter, and they are both dead. Scheffer
made him known to me, and has been, I understand, wonderfully generous
and good to him." Nor may I omit to state the enjoyment afforded him,
not only by the presence in Paris during the winter of Mr. Wilkie
Collins and of Mr. and Mrs. White of Bonchurch, but by the many friends
from England whom the Art Exposition brought over. Sir Alexander
Cockburn was one of these; Edwin Landseer, Charles Robert Leslie, and
William Boxall, were others. Macready left his retreat at Sherborne to
make him a visit of several days. Thackeray went to and fro all the
time between London and his mother's house, also in the Champs Elysees,
where his daughters were. And Paris for the time was the home of Robert
Lytton, who belonged to the Embassy, of the Sartorises, of the
Brownings, and of others whom Dickens liked and cared for.

At the first play he went to, the performance was stopped while the news
of the last Crimean engagement, just issued in a supplement to the
_Moniteur_, was read from the stage. "It made not the faintest effect
upon the audience; and even the hired claqueurs, who had been absurdly
loud during the piece, seemed to consider the war not at all within
their contract, and were as stagnant as ditch-water. The theatre was
full. It is quite impossible to see such apathy, and suppose the war to
be popular, whatever may be asserted to the contrary." The day before,
he had met the Emperor and the King of Sardinia in the streets, "and, as
usual, no man touching his hat, and very very few so much as looking
round."

The success of a most agreeable little piece by our old friend Regnier
took him next to the Francais, where Plessy's acting enchanted him. "Of
course the interest of it turns upon a flawed piece of living china
(_that_ seems to be positively essential), but, as in most of these
cases, if you will accept the position in which you find the people, you
have nothing more to bother your morality about." The theatre in the Rue
Richelieu, however, was not generally his favourite resort. He used to
talk of it whimsically as a kind of tomb, where you went, as the Eastern
people did in the stories, to think of your unsuccessful loves and dead
relations. "There is a dreary classicality at that establishment
calculated to freeze the marrow. Between ourselves, even one's best
friends there are at times very aggravating. One tires of seeing a man,