gs
were again in Paris. An impulsive friend had taken an apartment for them
in the Rue de Grenelle, facing east, and in all that concerned comfort
splendidly mendacious. After some weeks of misery and illness Mrs
Browning was conveyed to less glittering but more hospitable rooms in
the Rue du Colisee by a desperate husband--"That darling Robert carried
me into the carriage, swathed past possible breathing, over face and
respirator in woollen shawls. No, he wouldn't set me down even to walk
up the fiacre steps, but shoved me in upside down in a struggling
bundle."[70] Happily the winter was of a miraculous mildness. Mrs
Browning worked _Aurora Leigh_ in "a sort of _furia_," and Browning set
himself to the task--a fruitless one as it proved--of rehandling and
revising _Sordello_: "I lately gave time and pains," he afterwards told
Milsand in his published dedication of the poem, "to turn my work into
what the many might,--instead of what the few must--like: but after all
I imagined another thing at first, and therefore leave as I find
it"--proud but warrantable words. Some of his leisure was given to
vigorous and not unsuccessful efforts in drawing. At the theatre he saw
Ristori as Medea and admired her, but with qualifications. At Monckton
Milnes's dinner-table he met Mignet and Cavour, and George Sand crowned
with an ivy-wreath and "looking like herself." Mrs Browning records with
pleasure that her husband's hostility to the French government had
waned; at least he admitted that he was sick of the Opposition.

In May 1856 tidings from London of the illness of Kenyon caused him
serious anxiety; he would gladly have hastened to attend upon so true
and dear a friend, but this Kenyon would not permit. A month later he
and Mrs Browning were in occupation of Kenyon's house in Devonshire
Place, which he had lent to them for the summer, but the invalid had
sought for restoration of his health in the Isle of Wight. On the day
that Mr Barrett heard of his daughter's arrival he ordered his family
away from London. Mrs Browning once more wrote to him, but the letter
received no answer. "Mama," said little Pen earnestly, "if you've been
very, very naughty I advise you to go into the room and say,'_Papa, I'll
be dood_.'" But the situation, as Mrs Browning sadly confesses, was
hopeless. Some companionship with her sister Arabel and her brothers was
gained by a swift departure from London in August for Ventnor whither
the Wimpole Street