He can't speak now or lift up his eyelids, and I am too magnanimous in opposition to talk of anything else in his presence except Verdi's last opera, which magnanimity he appreciates, though he has no ear.

About a month ago he came suddenly to life again.

'Have you heard the news?
Napoleon is suspected of making a secret treaty with Russia.' The next morning he was as dead as ever--poor man! It's a desperate case for him.
Are you not happy--_you_--in this fast union between England and France?
Some of our English friends, coming to Italy through France, say that the general feeling towards England, and the affectionate greetings and sympathies lavished upon them as Englishmen by the French everywhere, are quite strange and touching.

'In two or three years,' said a Frenchman on a railroad, 'French and English, we shall make only one nation.' Are you very curious about the subject of gossip just now between Lord Palmerston and Louis Napoleon?
We hear from somebody in Paris, whose _metier_ it is to know everything, that it refers to the readjustment of affairs in Italy.

May God grant it! The Italians have been hanging their whole hope's weight upon Louis Napoleon ever since he came to power, and if he does now what he can for them I shall be proud of my _protege_--oh, and so glad! Robert and I clapped our hands yesterday when we heard this; we couldn't refrain, though our informant was reactionary and in a deep state of conservative melancholy.