Two years later Miss Thackeray was also on the coast of Normandy and at
no great distance. "It was a fine hot summer," she writes, "with
sweetness and completeness everywhere; the cornfields gilt and
far-stretching, the waters blue, the skies arching high and clear, and
the sunsets succeeding each other in most glorious light and beauty."
Some slight misunderstanding on Browning's part, the fruit of
mischief-making gossipry, which caused constraint between him and his
old friend was cleared away by the good offices of Milsand. While Miss
Thackeray sat writing, with shutters closed against the blazing sun,
Browning himself "dressed all in white, with a big white umbrella under
his arm," arrived to take her hand with all his old cordiality. A
meeting of both with the Milsands, then occupying a tiny house in a
village on the outer edges of Luc-sur-mer, soon followed, and before the
sun had fallen that evening they were in Browning's house upon the cliff
at Saint-Aubin. "The sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea
beyond--fresh-swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book
upon the table. Mr Browning told us it was the only book he had with
him. The bedrooms were as bare as the sitting-room, but I remember a
little dumb piano standing in a corner, on which he used to practise in
the early morning. I heard Mr Browning declare they were perfectly
satisfied with their little house; that his brains, squeezed as dry as a
sponge, were only ready for fresh air."[106] Perhaps Browning's "only
book" of 1872 contained the dramas of AEschylus, for at Fontainebleau
where he spent some later weeks of the year these were the special
subject of his study. It was at Saint-Aubin in 1872 that he found the
materials for his poem of the following year, and to Miss Thackeray's
drowsy name for the district,