She returned to Paris on May 30, and after a week spent with M. and Madame Mohl, during which she again inspected various hospitals, she entered the Maison de la Providence in the Rue Oudinot on June 8. From Paris she kept up correspondence with regard to the new premises for the institution in London. "The indispensable conditions of a suitable house are," she wrote to Lady Canning (June 5), "_first_, that the nurse should never be obliged to quit her floor, except for her own dinner and supper, and her patients' dinner and supper (and even the latter might be avoided by the windlass we have talked about). Without a system of this kind, the nurse is converted into a pair of legs. _Secondly_, That the bells of the patients should all ring in the passage outside the nurse's own door _on that story_, and should have a valve which flies open when its bell rings, and _remains_ open in order that the nurse may see who has rung." The letter continues for some pages to describe other requirements--about a hot-water supply and the like; points which are now in the A B C of hospitals or nursing-homes, but which then were novel counsels of perfection. The idea of a lift, in particular, was new; inquiries were made by the ladies in various parts of the country, and there were many hitches before a suitable apparatus was installed. The correspondence is significant of the attention to practical detail which characterized all Miss Nightingale's work. Meanwhile her work with the Sisters of Charity among the poor came to a tiresome pause. The nurse had herself to be nursed. The nature of the calamity is described in a letter to Madame Mohl, who was paying visits in England at the time:--
BACK DRAWING-ROOM AT MADAME MOHL'S, RUE DU BAC 120, _June_ 28. MY DEAREST FRIENT--Do you see where I am? Here's a "go"! Has M. Mohl told you? Here am I in bed in your back drawing-room. Poor M. Mohl appears to bear it with wonderful equanimity and recueillement, like his danseuse. Not so I. It is the most impertinent, the most surprising, the most inopportune thing I have ever done--me established in a lady's house in her absence, to be ill. If M. Mohl had any sins, I should think I was the avenging Phooka appointed to castigate him--as he has none, I am obliged to arrest myself at the other supposition that it is for my own. It was not my fault though really. Here is how the things have happened....