February 27 Thursday – The Clemens family left Munich by rail for Paris, France. Sam had planned to leave at 6:40 AM and travel to Strasburg (at that time in Germany) by 5:30 PM and spend the night there, continuing on to Paris on Feb. 28 [MTLE 4: 29]. Sam noted “Feb 27, at Strasburg” in his notebook [2: 292].

From Munich to Ulm:  The Bavarian Maximilian’s Railway. From Ulm to Stuttgard. Karlsruhe and Strassburg:  Royal Württemberg State Railways

February 28, 1879, the Clemens family arrives in Paris and takes up residency at the Grand Hotel St. James in the rue Saint-Honoré.  [Five Months in Paris]

They “had a most comfortable day in the cars” despite falling snow, Livy wrote her mother; overnighted in Strasburg, “where we found pleasant rooms with open fires’; and arrived in Paris at dusk on February 28. They registered first at the Grand Hôtel St. James on the rue Saint-Honoré, near the Place Vendéme and the Louvre, but their parlor was so spacious that the fireplace failed to heat it.Sam was more forthright in his notebook: “This is the very hatefulest room I have seen in Europe” because it was “cold, & raw & unwarmable.” On March 4 they moved a few blocks to the Hôtel de Normandie on the rue de 'Echelle, near the avenue de I’Opera, the Tuileries, the Théatre Francais, and the Royal Palace. “We are very nicely situated here,’ Livy wrote Sam Moffett, “but it is a much more expensive place than we intended to stop in’ and “we could not suit ourselves better although we looked about a good deal.”  [From page 276-7 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891]