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Paris, Wednesday
February 10, 1886
My lovable darling
What a magic city this Paris is! Shall I start by talking about yesterday or shall I answer your many, many questions? Let me start with yesterday. It was the pleasantest evening I have spent here so far. I arrived very early and at the same time as Charcot himself, but he put me at my ease at once by saying that I had been invited not by him but by Madame. My early arrival gave me the advantage of having Mlle and then Madame to myself. Mlle was very friendly but, as you will be glad to hear, rather inaccessible. More details later. Madame was soon called away by sounds in the background and said by way of explanation: “C'est lui, il ne sait pas se mettre la cravate lui-même”! I was delighted to share this failing with the great man. He soon appeared and I had him to myself for a quarter of an hour during which I had the chance of mentioning a number of things: first, the news about the child outpatients,1 to which he said: “Mais c'est quelque chose”; then about my departure, then about a little theory I have evolved around the case he put at my disposal, which he liked very much; then about the translation, and so on. He remarked that Paris was doing me good and that I had “engraissé.” Gradually the guests arrived and we sat down to dinner. Apart from the Charcot family (four in number), there was the sculptor of the recently unveiled statue of Claude Bernard,2 then Charcot's chief assistant Richet3 and his wife-the latter in a somewhat denuded state for which, considering her beauty, one could hardly blame her and who, as a matter of fact, sat as silent as a statue-then a M. Mendelssohn, a Jew, from Warsaw, who had been Charcot's assistant as well as a pupil of the Berlin physiologists and is now working under enviable