May 12 Thursday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto near Florence Sam wrote a letter to Richard Watson Gilder that he added to on May 13.
A friend of ours (the Baroness de Nolde) was here this afternoon & wanted a note of introduction to the Century, for she has something to sell to you in case you ’ll want to make an offer after seeing a sample of the goods. I said, “With pleasure; get the goods ready, send the same to me, I will have Jean type-write them, then I will mail them to the Century; and to-night I will write the note to Mr. Gilder & start it along.” Also, write me a letter embodying what you have been saying to me about the goods & your proposed plan of arranging & explaining them, & I will forward that to Gilder, too.”
As to the Baroness. She is German; 30 years old; was married at 17; is very pretty—indeed I may say very pretty; has a lot of sons, (5) running up from 7 to 12 years old. Her husband is a Russian. They live half the time in Russia & the other half in Florence, & supply population alternately to the one country & then to the other. Of course it is a family that speaks languages. This occurs at their table—I know it by experience. It is Babel come again. The other day, when no guests were present to keep order, the tribe were all talking at once, & 6 languages were being traded in; at last the littlest boy lost his temper, clapped his hands to his ears & screamed this out, mixed with angry sobs: “Mais vraiment is non capisco GAR nichts!”
But as I was going to say: the Baroness is a grand daughter of Benjamin Constant. Benjamin, before his marriage, had a long & warm love-passage with Madame de Stäel (which did not end with his marriage altogether) & his love-letters have come along down on the Constant side landing at last in this grand-daughter’s possession. She proposes to publish some of them (there are 120) with helpful remarks & annotations scattered along, for the which she has qualified herself by studying the period. Up to now the de Broglie side of the house has always been able to keep the letters out of print, & the present Duke is raising such Cain as he can to continue the suppression, but the Baroness is not listening to him.
She is a little afraid of her English, therefore she will write her remarks in French—I said there’s a plenty of translators in New York. Examine her samples & drop her a line. Her address is Villa Curonia, sopra Poggis Imperiale, Florence.
For two entire days, now, we have not been anxious about Mrs. Clemens (Unberufen!) After 20 months of bedridden solitude & bodily misery she all of a sudden ceases to be a pallid & shrunken shadow, & looks bright & young & pretty. She remains what she always was, the most wonderful creature for fortitude, patience, endurance, & recuperative power that ever was. But oh, dear, it won’t last; this fiendish malady will play new treacheries upon her, & I shall go back to my prayers again—unutterable from any pulpit! / With love to you & yours…. [MTP].
Sam’s notebook: “Lunch 1 p.m / Mrs. Ross’s to meet a golden pheasant and Signore” [NB 47 TS 10-11].
May 12, after – Baroness Elisabeth de Nolde wrote from Florence to Sam. “Many thanks for having taken the trouble about the publication of the Stael letters. After the counsel and explanation you kindly gave me about publishing them first in America, I am of course very much disposed to do so. I am not astonished that Harpers is not in raptures at the idea…I believe I ought to write to him or Century Magazine…” [MTP].
Note: Madame de Stael (1766-1817) and her married lover, Benjamin Constant (1767- 1830). Sam also met the Baroness on May 12 and described her to Gilder. She sought a publisher. Duneka of Harper’s had been tepid in his response, and Gilder evidently was as well. Putnam published her volume in 1905.