May 13 Friday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto near Florence Sam finished his May 12 to Richard
Watson Gilder.
“May 13, 10 a.m. I have just paid one of my pair of permitted 2-minute-visits-per-day to the sickroom. And found what I have learned to expect—retrogression. Blue lips, the pallor of the dead, & that pathetic something in the eye which betrays the secret of a waning hope” [MTP].
Kirke La Shelle wrote from the Grand Hotel, Florence to Sam. “I am sending you herewith a note of introduction from Abner Herferd [sp?], and if you will be good enough to let Mrs La Shelle and I invade your peaceful retirement we will try to deliver a very large consignment of regards from the Elihu Vedders [sic Vedder] whom we have just left in Rome” [MTP]. Note: Elihu Vedder (1836-1923), American painter and illustrator, best known for his 55 illustrations in Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which Sam was quite familiar with (he had written he was “a bond slave to Fitzgerald’s Omar”; see Nov. 8, 1899 entry). In 1890 Vedder helped establish the In Arte Libertas group in Italy.