September 25 Sunday – The Clemenses moved into the Villa Viviani, five miles outside of Florence, Italy [Sept. 24 to Phelps].

Susy began a letter “on our first Sunday in Florence” to Louise Brownell, and finished it on Sept. 26 (though the letter was not postmarked until Oct. 13.) She related the delay the family experienced in Frankfurt (see Sept. 12 entry), and continued:

Clara stays with us until the cholera abates in Berlin. She watches the reports anxiously and hates to be lingering away from that indispensable Mr. Moritz Moskowski!

We crossed the frontier easily without fumigation or much examination. Today we all go up to the Villa to take our first meal and tomorrow we hope to move in. …

…We have an addition to our family — a very pleasant Mademoiselle Lanson [Lançon] who is to talk French with us and help Mamma with the housekeeping. We had never seen her till we arrived the other night and found her awaiting us. And we have never ventured to take an outsider into the family before! It is a relief to find her kind and cultivated instead of vulgar and disagreeable as she might have been. I am to study history and French with her and Italian outside [Cotton 101165].

Susy’s shocker:

Papa came home yesterday with his hair shaved tight to his head. You cannot imagine what a sight he is! His poor afflicted family wish he would decline all invitations and withdraw to live the life of a hermit till it grows out again [Cotton 101168].

Note: Sam had an irritated scalp which caused the extreme act. It would provide biographers like Kaplan with grist for symbolism: “He was bothered most of all by a real and symbolic divestment of identity and power, and he went into seclusion, which he welcomed” [316]. This sort of thing won Kaplan the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. Happily, no Samson references were made.