March 30 Sunday – Sam and Livy (and Susy per her father) wrote from Paris to Olivia Lewis Langdon.

Things go along just the same, mother dear. There is no change. I still catch cold & am pestered with rheumatism, & as a consequence my work lags & drags & mostly stands still. Livy has pains in the back of her neck, & the old ones in her spine, but she keeps up her studies & other activities with spirit. The children have French colds which can’t be told from German ones by people ignorant of the language. Rosa has a horrible cold. Clara Spaulding has the twin to it. She studies hard & has got into the new language so deeply now that the French can’t understand her French & we can’t understand her English.

Sam and daughter Clara wrote to Jane Lampton Clemens and Pamela A. Moffett, this a similar letter written to Olivia Lewis Langdon the same day. Clara’s letter is noteworthy:

Well, that I’ve got a dress, & a new one, & is silk & got gold buttons, & that I’m bigger’n thicker’n I was before, & that I got a great big doll, & that t’isn’t broken yet; & that I got a horse, & its broken; the car came off it, & that its car is broken, & that I know how to take it (the ear) out; & two legs is broken, & his tail is come out.

      I had a hard pinch in my finger: that I was looking in the looking-glass door & Rosa closed the looking glass; & sometimes Susie plays with my things & I get a-fighting at her. That’s all, now, that I can write.

      And that all my names is Clara Lewis O’Day Botheker McAleer McLachlin Bay Clemens. (Her wet-nurses) [MTPO].

Sam then dictated for Susy about playing ball and “bind man’s puff”; and the elevator boy and Queen Victoria being in the city. Livy added the rest of the letter, about Clara Spaulding having lunch with the artist, William Gedney Bunce (1840-1916), cousin of Edward (Ned) Bunce of Hartford; and about her dislike of Mr. Healy (who seemed like “one of Dickens characters a kind of made up man”) and his “most uninteresting” wife and daughters serving tea so bad she couldn’t drink it [MTLE 4: 43-4].