Marie-Henry Beyle, better known by his
pen name, Stendhal, [273] who, while he was French Counul here, pumice
polished and prepared for the press his masterpiece, La Chartreuse de
Parme, which he had written at Padua in 1830. To the minor luminary,
Charles Lever, we have already alluded. Such was the town in which the
British Hercules was set to card wool. The Burtons occupied ten rooms at
the top of a block of buildings situated near the railway station. The
corridor was adorned with a picture of our Saviour, and statuettes of
St. Joseph and the Madonna with votive lights burning before them.
This, in Burton's facetious phrase, was "Mrs. Burton's joss house;" and
occasionally, when they had differences, he threatened "to throw her
joss house out of the window." Burton in a rage, indeed, was the signal
for the dispersal of everybody. Furniture fell, knick-knacks flew from
the table, and like Jupiter he tumbled gods on gods. If, however, he and
his wife did not always symphonize, still, on the whole, they continued
to work together amicably, for Mrs. Burton took considerable pains to
accommodate herself to the peculiarities of her husband's temperament,
and both were blessed with that invaluable oil for troubled waters--the
gift of humour. "Laughter," Burton used to say, and he had "a curious
feline laugh," "animates the brain and stimulates the lungs." To his
wife's assumption of the possession of knowledge, of being a linguist,
of being the intellectual equal of every living person, saving himself,
he had no objection; and the pertinacity with which she sustained this
role imposed sometimes even on him. He got to think that she was really
a genius in a way, and saw merit even in the verbiage and rhodomontade
of her books. But whatever Isabel Burton's faults, they are all drowned
and forgotten in her devotion to her husband. It was more than love--it
was unreasoning worship. "You and Mrs. Burton seem to jog along pretty
well together," said a friend. "Yes," followed Burton, "I am a spoilt
twin, and she is the missing fragment."

Burton, of course, never really took to Trieste, his Tomi, as he called
it. He was too apt to contrast it with Damascus: the wind-swept Istrian
hills with the zephyr-ruffled Lebanon, the dull red plains of the
Austrian sea-board with the saffron of the desert, the pre-historic
castellieri or hill-forts, in which, nevertheless, he took some
pleasure, with the columned glories of Baalbak and Palmyr