In this insomniac reverie Dickens mingles memories of his travels in America (1842) and Switzerland (1846), and of many visits to Paris, with a vivid childhood reminiscence and with more recent news items. He had ascended the Great St Bernard with a party of friends, including two very dear ones, the Hon. Richard Watson and his wife Lavinia (Watson's death, in July 1852, grieved him deeply), at the beginning of September 1846. He wrote a lively description of the convent and its monks to Forster (Forster, Book 5, Ch. 4) in which he called the monks 'a piece of sheer humbug...a lazy set of fellows...driving a good trade in Innkeeping'. The convent's 'menagerie smell' he refers to again in Little Dorrit (Book 2, Ch. 1): 'a smell...coming up from the floor, of tethered beasts, like the smell of a menagerie of wild animals'.
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