Letter: TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON



[MENTONE, MARCH 28, 1874.]

MY DEAR MOTHER, - Beautiful weather, perfect weather; sun, pleasant
cooling winds; health very good; only incapacity to write.

The only new cloud on my horizon (I mean this in no menacing sense)
is the Prince. I have philosophical and artistic discussions with
the Prince. He is capable of talking for two hours upon end,
developing his theory of everything under Heaven from his first
position, which is that there is no straight line. Doesn't that
sound like a game of my father's - I beg your pardon, you haven't
read it - I don't mean MY father, I mean Tristram Shandy's. He is
very clever, and it is an immense joke to hear him unrolling all
the problems of life - philosophy, science, what you will - in this
charmingly cut-and-dry, here-we-are-again kind of manner. He is
better to listen to than to argue withal. When you differ from
him, he lifts up his voice and thunders; and you know that the
thunder of an excited foreigner often miscarries. One stands
aghast, marvelling how such a colossus of a man, in such a great
commotion of spirit, can open his mouth so much and emit such a
still small voice at the hinder end of it all. All this while he
walks about the room, smokes cigarettes, occupies divers chairs for
divers brief spaces, and casts his huge arms to the four winds like
the sails of a mill. He is a most sportive Prince.