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separate things, entirely, from the proper French society.
We have been to few of them, and found them very splendid, very crowded, and very tiresome; so much of the last that we were guilty, only last night, of neglecting an invitation to the palace, where we should have met above three thousand people!
At the Austrian Ambassador's, a little while ago, we met two thousand.
But though such crowds go, and though the balls at the palace are more splendid than anything of the sort I have seen in Europe, I have never yet found a single person who would say they were agreeable.
So perverse is fashion, and so severe in its sway.
One more place I must add, separate from all the rest; the neat and quiet salon of Thierry, the historian of the Norman Conquest, long since totally blind, and, from a ten-years' paralysis of his lower limbs, incapable of motion, but with his faculties as active and his habits of labor as efficient as they ever were.
He is now the person relied on by the government as head of a commission to collect all manuscripts relating to the history of the cities and of the tiers état in France; besides which he is writing, himself, a history of the Merovingian dynasty.
I have passed several most agreeable evenings with him,—one last week, when he was so ill as to be in bed, but still directing two or three young men about the great work of collecting the manuscripts.
He is a wonderful man, and his letters on French history, and other small works published within ten years, give no token of his infirmities, over which his spirit seems completely to triumph.
As the time draws near for leaving this exciting, but wearing state of society, we feel more and more impatient to get home.
I hope we shall be able to embark before midsummer, so as to get a good passage, and see you all the sooner.
Love to all We are all quite well; but I am grievously pushed for time.
G. T.
To William H. Prescott, Boston.
Paris, March 5, 1838.
my dear William,—I send you a single line by this packet, to let you know that three days ago I received from Bentley the six copies of your ‘Ferdinand and Isabella.’
One I sent instantly to Julius,1 by Treuttel and Wurtz, his booksellers here, as he desired; one to Von Raumer by a similar conveyance, with a request to him 