with my distinguished and unfortunate friend Madame Roland (in two
volumes which I bought for two francs each, at the book-stall in
the Place de la Concorde, Paris, at the corner of the Rue Royale).
Deciding to pass the evening tete-a-tete with Madame Roland, I
derived, as I always do, great pleasure from that spiritual woman’s
society, and the charms of her brave soul and engaging
conversation. I must confess that if she had only some more
faults, only a few more passionate failings of any kind, I might
love her better; but I am content to believe that the deficiency is
in me, and not in her. We spent some sadly interesting hours
together on this occasion, and she told me again of her cruel
discharge from the Abbaye, and of her being re-arrested before her
free feet had sprung lightly up half-a-dozen steps of her own
staircase, and carried off to the prison which she only left for
the guillotine.
Madame Roland and I took leave of one another before mid-night, and
I went to bed full of vast intentions for next day, in connexion
with the unparalleled chapter. To hear the foreign mail-steamers
coming in at dawn of day, and to know that I was not aboard or
obliged to get up, was very comfortable; so, I rose for the chapter
in great force.
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Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
I had advanced so far as to sit down at my window again on my
second morning, and to write the first half-line of the chapter and
strike it out, not liking it, when my conscience reproached me with
not having surveyed the watering-place out of the season, after
all, yesterday, but with having gone straight out of it at the rate
of four miles and a half an hour. Obviously the best amends that I
could make for this remissness was to go and look at it without
another moment’s delay. So – altogether as a matter of duty – I
gave up the magnificent chapter for another day, and sauntered out
with my hands in my pockets.
All the houses and lodgings ever let to visitors, were to let that
morning. It seemed to have snowed bills with To Let upon them.
This put me upon thinking what the owners of all those apartments
did, out of the season; how they employed their time, and occupied
their minds. They could not be always going to the Methodist
chapels, of which I passed one every other minute. They must have
some other recreation. Whether they pretended to take one
another’s lodgings, and opened one another’s tea-caddies in fun?
Whether they cut slices off their own beef and mutton, and made
believe that it belonged to somebody else? Whether they played
little dramas of life, as children do, and said, ‘I ought to come
and look at your apartments, and you ought to ask two guineas aweek
too much, and then I ought to say I must have the rest of the
day to think of it, and then you ought to say that another lady and
gentleman with no children in family had made an offer very close
to your own terms, and you had passed your word to give them a
positive answer in half an hour, and indeed were just going to take
the bill down when you heard the knock, and then I ought to take
them, you know?’ Twenty such speculations engaged my thoughts.
Then, after passing, still clinging to the walls, defaced rags of
the bills of last year’s Circus, I came to a back field near a
timber-yard where the Circus itself had been, and where there was
yet a sort of monkish tonsure on the grass, indicating the spot
where the young lady had gone round upon her pet steed Firefly in
her daring flight. Turning into the town again, I came among the
shops, and they were emphatically out of the season. The chemist
had no boxes of ginger-beer powders, no beautifying sea-side soaps
and washes, no attractive scents; nothing but his great goggle-eyed
red bottles, looking as if the winds of winter and the drift of the