after her husband's death Mrs. Thackeray married her first
lover.

Meantime, Thackeray was unwillingly at school. When
he left his first school and went to Charterhouse he still did
not enjoy himself. Time and Cambridge eventually cured
that unhappiness, and after Cambridge he made various false
and rather dilettante attempts at finding a profession. The
truth was that his father had left him too much money. He
thought of art and of the law. He went to Paris to study art.
There he fell in love, and as he lost his money at the same
time, his fond step-father had to find a means of providing
for him. He ingeniously bought a newspaper so that
Thackeray could be appointed Paris correspondent and
marry. The newspaper did not take long to fail, and then
Thackeray found in his mother-in-law's behaviour a model
for the Campaigner and Mrs. Baynes.

Soon the young couple were living in Bloomsbury, like
the young people in The Great Hoggarty Diamond and in
Philip. Children came, three daughters, of whom one died
as a baby, and after the third was born, calamity. Mrs.
Thackeray lost her reason and had to live with an attendant
in the country. She outlived Thackeray, so he was condemned
to a widower's life for ever. He had one sentimental friend-
ship sufficiently deep to disturb him seriously, with Mrs.
Brookfield. That story, with its abrupt termination, has
now been fully told. Afterwards, as the two girls grew
older, his life centred more and more on them.

A writer's domestic life is likely to be as simple as the life
of the Vicar of Wakefield, who only moved from the blue
bed to the brown. Thackeray moved from Bloomsbury to
Kensington, where finally he built himself the lovely house
in Palace Gardens which is now the Israeli Embassy. His
life can be followed in the many portraits, drawings and
photographs that were made of him, and the pictures and
photographs of the rooms in which he wrote. He was a
great friend of many artists, and was happy to live publicly
in this way. By contrast, the intense privacy of a writer's

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