February 11 Sunday – In New York at the Players Club Sam wrote to Poultney Bigelow, responding to his new book, and a “charming invitation.” Sam wrote about his “great big anonymous historical romance,” on which he’d already written 93,000 words, and only a third of the book (Joan of Arc).

I am hoping that I can get away from here about the end of this month and go to my family in Paris. Meantime I will forward your letter to Mrs. Pudd’nhead Wilson Clemens (I think I will call her that, now, because in her last letter she unconsciously dropped an aphorism which I mean to put in Pudd’nhead’s mouth) and let her be considering that charming invitation of yours.

It is my impression that she is due at Tolz, Bavaria the first week in June, to take a 5-week course of the baths. It would be grand if we could then go to you in the Austrian Alps.

Sam closed by relating he’d tried to get the Players Club to remit dues when he was absent in Europe, but “they reminded me, that I was a nonresident member and paid only half-rates anyway” [MTP]. Note: Bigelow’s book, Paddles and Politics Down the Danube (1892) was published by Webster & Co. [Gribben 70].

Sam began a letter to Livy that he finished on Feb. 13.

My Dear Mrs. Pudd’nhead Wilson Clemens:

So you’ve gone into the aphorism-business yourself, it appears! And with distinguished success, too:

“A thing which has been long expected takes the shape of the unexpected when it comes at last.”

That has gone into my note-book, & will go thence into Puddnhead’s mouth.

Sam explained why he’d sent the “Nearing success” cable late, and then laid out his plans to join her, with reasons things were taking so long. He wanted to be able to sell some of his stock in the new company through the Elmira broker, J.M. Shoemaker, and he needed to establish a price. He’d had to wait “many days for Shoemaker — his business wouldn’t let him come. He explained:

And you see it is very necessary for me to make my half of the pool good, & also to clear off Websterco’s bank debt.

Goodness knows I want to sail badly enough, but when I sail I want to be sure that my matters are in such shape here that no cables will be summoning me back from Paris the minute I get there. I want to work when I get to Paris, & an uneasy mind is not good machinery to work with.

Here Sam put a break in the letter, as if to return to it later. He then wrote about the rates he could demand from magazines.

Howells said in a magazine article some weeks ago that there were only two or three people in America who could command $100 a page in a magazine & that I was one of them. (I am quoting from hearsay, I didn’t read it myself.) Well, I was offered $250 a page by a newspaper-syndicate yesterday. It didn’t cost me a pang to decline it. I’d druther write for the magazines at half the rate. The Cosmopolitan pays me $140 a page. It was Warner who told me of Howells’s remark. He rather doubted if anybody got as much as $100 a page; & then with characteristic inquisitiveness asked me flatly what I did get. I told him I got that much & sometimes a little more. Do you know what he’ll do now? He’ll strike for a hundred (“& a little more”) himself. It’s all right. Authors are too much given to (commercially) undervaluing their wares [ MTP]. Note: Sam finished the letter on Feb. 11 and Feb. 13.

At midnight Sam continued the letter, into the next day, Feb. 12. He wrote of having a dinner with the Charles A. Dana family, Dana editor of the N.Y. Sun.

Family dinner, because they have lost a relative lately & have shut up shop — society speaking — for the required term. Mrs. Dana & the eldest daughter (Mrs. Draper, young-looking mother of grown-up doctors of medicine) are delightful; & so is Mr. Dana. We had a shouting good time. I gave the history of Capt. Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven. It is a raging pity that that book has never been printed. And yet if it were printed it would spoil it as a dinner-table yarn. I should be sorry for that, for it is the surest card at a dinner table that ever was. It never fails — it can’t fail. It nearly killed Miss Frelinghuysen the other night, & those other people. And Miss F. is a pillar of the Episcopal Church. …Why I remember, now, that I told it to John Addington Symonds in his quarters one rainy night in Venice. An Englishman, you know — yet he laughed like a fiend. He said it was a crime to keep it out of print.