London, May 7/78

My dear Chummeke: --

Are you back in ‘Frisco? If you are write me for I am back from war and murder and cold and starvation, safe and sound, and have seen Iza Hardy twice and have gaumed [complained?] about you.[1] You base, bold, bad man, why didn’t you write me before?

I am here only on business negociating [sic] about a book or two. Write me then to Paris as of yore. I have a live Bashi-Bazouk there and a big Newfoundland dog. My people send love and Wetherbee too.[2] Write me now you “yjut of the Riva” [?] or I shall be mad.[3]

Yours with all my heart

Frank[4]

Notes

1. Iza Duffus Hardy (1850-1922) was the daughter of Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy (1804-1878), Deputy Keeper of the Public Record Office, and his second wife Lady May Anne Hardy, novelist and travel writer (1824-1891). Iza followed her mother and was also an author who published over thirty books and numerous short stories in the 1870s and 1880s. See: https://web.archive.org/web/20110225032151/http://www.preraphaelites.org/the-collection/1904p498/portrait-of-miss-iza-duffus-hardy/ (via Internet Archive)
   
2. Who were "my people"? Perhaps they were the Merrills?
3. Millet may refer to Riva del Garda, a town and comune in the northern Italian province of Trentino. It is also known simply as Riva.
4. There evidently is no existing letter from Millet to Stoddard announcing his marriage in 1879 to Lily Merrill. The letters, instead, jump from 1878 to 1884. Millet first mentions Lily as his wife (five years since the marriage) in his August 23, 1884, letter to Stoddard. One wonders if one or more letters did once exist, though the frequency of Millet’s letters (and the intensity of the ardor expressed within) had decreased greatly after mid-1877. Did Stoddard perhaps destroy such a letter rather than keep it, as he did Millet’s earlier letters? Millet did announce his wedding plans to others. In February, 1879, Millet wrote from Paris to Dr. and Mrs. Parker to announce his intention to marry Lily Merrill on March 11 of that year. See Francis Davis Millet and Millet family papers, 1858-1984 (bulk 1858-1955). Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.