[Paris]: 3 Rue du Colisee: February 28, 1856 [postmark].

My dearest Mona Nina,--Three letters, one on the top of another, and I
don't answer. Shame on me. How I have thought of you, to make up! And
you write to apologise to _us_, from a dreamy mystical apprehension that
we may peradventure have lost eightpence on your account! Well, it would
have been awful if we had. And so Providence interposed with a special
miracle, and obliged the officials to accept the actual penny stamp for
the fourpenny stamp you meant to put, and _we paid just nothing for the
terrible letter_! Take heart, therefore, in future, before all
hypothetical misfortunes. That's the moral of the tale....

My dear friend, how shall I pull you and make you come to Paris? Madame
de Triqueti was here the other day, and spoke of you, and swore she
wouldn't help to take rooms for you, unless you came near _her_. As to
the two rooms you speak of, I am sure you might have what rooms you
pleased now, in this neighbourhood. What would you give? Our present
apartment is comfort itself, and except some cold days a short time
after you went away, we have really had no winter. The miraculous warmth
has saved me, for I was so _felled_ in that Rue de Grenelle, I should
scarcely have had force against an ordinary cold season. Little Penini
has been blossoming like a rose all the time. Such a darling, idle,
distracted child he is, not keeping his attention for three minutes
together for the hour and a half I teach him, and when I upbraid him for
it, throwing himself upon me like a dog, kissing my cheeks and head and
hands. 'O you little pet, _dive_ me one chance more! I will really be
dood,' and learning everything by magnetism, getting on in seven weeks,
for instance, to read French quite surprisingly. He has written a poem
on the war and the peace, called 'Soldiers going and coming,' which
Robert and I thought so remarkable that I sent it to Mr. Forster. Oh,
such a darling, that child is! I expect the wings to grow presently.

As for my poem (far below Penini's), I work on steadily and have put in
order and transcribed five books, containing in all above six thousand
lines ready for the press. I have another book to put together and
transcribe, and then must begin the composition part of one or two more
books, I suppose. I must be ready for printing by the time we go to
England, in June. Robert too is much occupied with 'Sordello,'[49] and
we neither of us receive anybody till past four o'clock. I mean that
when you have read my new book, you put away all my other poems or most
of them, and know me only by the new. Oh, I am so anxious to make it
good. I have put much of myself in it--I mean to say, of my soul, my
thoughts, emotions, opinions; in other respects, there is not a personal
line, of course. It's a sort of poetic art-novel. If it's a failure,
there will be the comfort of having made a worthy effort, of having done
it as well as I could. Write soon to me, and love us both constantly, as
we do you.

Your ever affectionate
BA.