"and such a strange week it was," wrote Mrs. Browning to Miss
Mitford; "whether in the body, or out of the body, I can scarcely tell.
Our Balzac should be flattered beyond measure by my even thinking of him
at all." The journey from London to Paris was not then quite the swift and
easy affair it now is, the railroad between Paris and Havre not being then
completed beyond Rouen; still, such an elixir of life is happiness that
Mrs. Browning arrived in the French Capital feeling much better than when
she left London. Mrs. Jameson had only recently taken leave of Miss
Barrett on her sofa, and sympathetically offered to take her to Italy
herself for the winter with her niece; Miss Barrett had replied: "Not only
am I grateful to you, but happy to be grateful to you," but she had given
no hint of the impending marriage. Mrs. Jameson's surprise, on receiving
a note from Mrs. Browning, saying she was in Paris, was so great that her
niece, Geraldine Bate (afterward Mrs. MacPherson of Rome), asserted that
her aunt's amazement was "almost comical." Mrs. Jameson lost no time in
persuading the Brownings to join her and her niece at their quiet pension
in the Rue Ville l'Eveque, where they remained for a week,--this "strange
week" to Mrs. Browning.

In Paris they visited the galleries of the Louvre, but did little
sight-seeing beyond, "being satisfied with the idea of Paris," she said.

To a friend Mrs. Jameson wrote:

"I have also here a poet and a poetess--two celebrities who have run
away and married under circumstances peculiarly interesting, and such
as render imprudence the height of prudence. Both excellent; but God
help them! for I know not how the two poet heads and poet hearts will
get on through this prosaic world."

As for ways and means, however, the Brownings were sufficiently provided.
He had a modest independence, and she also had in her own right a little
fortune of some forty thousand pounds, yielding three or four hundred
pounds a year; but in the July preceding their marriage Browning, with his
sensitive honor, insisted upon her making a will bequeathing this capital
to her own family. In a letter to him dated July 27 of that summer the
story of his insistence on this is revealed in her own words: "I will
write the paper as you bid me.... You are noble in all things ... but I
will not discuss it so as to tease you.... I send you the paper therefore,
to that end, and only to that end...." Th