om he had now described himself and his pursuits.
'Use it for your writing and drawing. Nobody else uses it.' He stayed in
the house _six months_. The lady was a mistress, aged five-and-twenty,
and very beautiful, drinking her life away. The Squire was drunken, and
utterly depraved and wicked; but an excellent scholar, an admirable
linguist, and a great theologian. Two other mad visitors stayed the six
months. One, a man well known in Paris here, who goes about the world
with a crimson silk stocking in his breast pocket, containing a
tooth-brush and an immense quantity of ready money. The other, a college
chum of the Squire's, now ruined; with an insatiate thirst for drink;
who constantly got up in the middle of the night, crept down to the
dining-room, and emptied all the decanters. . . . B. stayed on in the
place, under a sort of devilish fascination to discover what might come
of it. . . . Tea or coffee never seen in the house, and very seldom water.
Beer, champagne, and brandy, were the three drinkables. Breakfast: leg
of mutton, champagne, beer, and brandy. Lunch: shoulder of mutton,
champagne, beer, and brandy. Dinner: every conceivable dish (Squire's
income, L7,000 a-year), champagne, beer, and brandy. The Squire had
married a woman of the town from whom he was now separated, but by whom
he had a daughter. The mother, to spite the father, had bred the
daughter in every conceivable vice. Daughter, then 13, came from school
once a month. Intensely coarse in talk, and always drunk. As they drove
about the country in two open carriages, the drunken mistress would be
perpetually tumbling out of one, and the drunken daughter perpetually
tumbling out of the other. At last the drunken mistress drank her
stomach away, and began to die on the sofa. Got worse and worse, and was
always raving about Somebody's where she had once been a lodger, and
perpetually shrieking that she would cut somebody else's heart out. At
last she died on the sofa, and, after the funeral, the party broke up. A
few months ago, B. met the man with the crimson silk stocking at
Brighton, who told him that the Squire was dead 'of a broken heart';
that the chum was dead of delirium tremens; and that the daughter was
heiress to the fortune. He told me all this, which I fully believe to be
true, without any embellishment--just in the off-hand way in which I
have told it to you."

Dickens left Paris at the end of April, and, after the summer in
Boulogne wh