accompanied him, as the climate was considered too hot for a young girl Lucie was sent to Miss Shepherd's school at Bromley. While her father and mother were Unitarians, at the age of 16 Lucie insisted on being baptised and confirmed as a member of the Church of England. As a girl Lucie made the acquaintance of Heinrich Heine. Lord Houghton's Monographs Personal and Social, 1873, pp. 323–32 contains an affecting narrative of her visits to the poet in Paris in 1854 shortly before his death. Marriage Upon her parents' return to England in 1838, Lucie attended her first society ball, which was held at Lansdowne House, the London home of the Marquess of Lansdowne, where she sighted the handsome Sir Alexander Cornewall Duff-Gordon, 3rd Baronet, of Halkin, who was ten years her senior. As her father descended into melancholy and self-doubt, her mother took on work as a translator, writing for various periodicals and as a teacher to support the family. Lucie was allowed to meet and walk out alone with Alexander. One day he said to her: "Miss Austin, do you know people say we are going to be married?" Annoyed at being talked of, and hurt at his brusque way of mentioning it, she was just going to give a sharp answer, when he added: "Shall we make it true?" to which she replied with the monosyllable, "Yes". The couple were married despite the initial objections of the groom's mother over Lucie's lack of a dowry) on 16 May 1840 in Kensington Old Church. Following her marriage at the age of 18 Lady Duff-Gordon continued with translating and various other writing projects. The couple resided at 8 Queen Square, Westminster, a house with a statue of Queen Anne at one end, since renumbered as 15 Queen Anne's Gate. Here a remarkable circle of friends and acquaintances frequently met. Lord Lansdowne, Lord Monteagle, Caroline Norton, Dickens, Thackeray, Elliot Warburton, Tom Taylor, Tennyson, Alexander Kinglake, and Henry Taylor were habitués, and every foreigner of talent and renown looked upon the house as a centre of interest. On one occasion Leopold von Ranke was among the visitors. A noted character in the establishment in Queen Square was a Nubian boy called Hassan el Bakkeet, who had been enslaved before being rescued by English missionaries. He had then obtained a position as a servant but after he was threatened with blindness