Then, when the pages on Victor Hugo were written, those already printed on Chateaubriand began to dissatisfy him, and he steeped himself once more in the rolling artificial harmonies, the mingled beauty and falsity of one of the most wonderful of styles, that he might draw from it its secrets and say a last just word about it.
He knew a few families in the neighbourhood, but he kept away from them, and almost his only connection with the outer world, during his first month in the country, was his correspondence with Madame de Chateauvieux, who was at Etretat with her husband.

She wrote her brother very lively, characteristic accounts of the life there, filling her letters with amusing sketches of the political or artistic celebrities with whom the little Norman town swarms in the season.
After the third or fourth letter, however, Kendal began to look restlessly at the Etretat postmark, to reflect that Marie had been there a long time, and to wonder she was not already tired of such a public sort of existence as the Etretat life.

The bathing scenes, and the fire-eating deputy, and the literary woman with a mission for the spread of naturalism, became very flat to him.

He was astonished that his sister was not as anxious to start for Italy as he was to hear that she had done so.
This temper of his was connected with the fact that after the first of August he began to develop a curious impatience on the subject of the daily post.

At Old House Farm the post was taken as leisurely as everything else; there was no regular delivery, and Kendal generally was content to trust to the casual mercies of the butcher or baker for his letters.