June 25 Monday – In La Bourboule-les-Bains, France Sam wrote to Susan Crane:
Sue, dear, this is a hurried line, just to say howdy & tell you the family news — hurried, for it must try to catch the steamer of day after to-morrow, & in France the mails — well, I don’t know what the system is — the shackly arrangement which the French regard as a postal “system” — I only know it is not swift & not certain — I think it travels by jackass & that the jackass is drunk.
Sam related their arrival on Saturday, June 23 after a hot, all-day trip from Paris. He called the place “this little gut in the hills” and explained they were there for the baths and water for Susy. Livy would be rested in about ten days and she would then write her sister. He also wrote about the small quarters (see in June 23 entry) [MTP].
Sam also wrote on Grand Hotel Des Iles Britanniques letterhead to Dr. Good, likely a Paris physician who evidently had given a letter of introduction to a doctor in La Bourboule.
We are located as above, & the quarters are good — everything considered — better than one has a right to expect in a small town like this, remotely situated. We find the scenery beautiful & the air delicious to breathe.
Sam reported that Livy and Susy were resting from the trip but that today they would “send the note of introduction to the doctor & begin business.” Sam ended with “kindest regards” to the doctor and to Miss Good, whom he was “engaged in a flirtation” with [MTP].
Sam also wrote to his sister, Pamela Moffett:
Mr. Hall’s letter, written and signed by you, has arrived. I will answer him by & by, but not now. At present I will say some things to you which must be kept private until my time comes. I don’t know who the small creditor is, whom I am protecting by the assignment. I am protecting a large one — Livy — to whom the firm owes twice-&-a-third as much money as it owes the next largest creditor, who is Whitford’s bank [Mt. Morris]. This $71,000 is owed honestly, & two-thirds of it ante-dates the bank debt.
Sam then identified the LAL and its loss at $54,000 as what “destroyed the firm.” He accused Fred Hall of sending two sets of notes for him to sign, each for $15,000, and representing them as the same loan. He also accused Hall of giving him a statement a year before showing debt of $150,000 when the actual amount was $196,000. He also accused Hall of lying about amounts he had drawn from the firm, and manipulating Sam into giving him the $14,000 from Livy’s investments.
O, yes, I have had advisers. Chiefest of them were Webster, Whitford and Hall.
Continue business — with Hall to manage? I reckon not. / Lovingly / Sam [MTP].
Sam also wrote to Henry H. Rogers. Since he’d not seen a cablegram, Sam assumed that the plan to continue Webster & Co. a year was not approved by the Mt. Morris Bank — “confound that stupid concern!” Sam admired Rogers’ “good reserve-stock of patience.”
He judged from Urban H. Broughton’s estimates that the typesetter would be completed in Chicago by the time he returned. Also, he praised their French location for fresh and cool air, and the “table-fare.”
…the rooms are unspeakably small, & the family are doing their best to believe they can survive the month. I am sorry to have to leave them before they get wonted, but I must. One can’t come down in the lift without sending a servant to the main floor & securing a special order from the landlord. Exquisitely European!
Sam had received news of the June 24 assassination of the French President, and remarked “We live in strange times” [MTHHR 66-7].
Sam also wrote a paragraph on the assassination to an unidentified person:
It seems strange to me that the statesmen and lawmakers of the world do not recognize…that new deterrents will have to be invented to meet the emergency. This ought to be easy to do, if, as I believe, the…mania has its origin in a vulgar vanity; for vanity cannot stand humiliation and ridicule. The man who will kill a chief magistrate for glory’s sake will think twice before he will do it for humiliation’s sake. He would not do it with genuine alacrity if he knew he would have to spend the rest of his life on exhibition in the Place de la Concorde clad in the short skirts and pink tights of a ballet girl, with a parasol in his hand and the passers-by privileged to pelt him with over-due eggs. The stocks were a valuable institution; their value lay in the fact that they inflicted humiliation. Something of this sort could be revived with profit, I think. The inflated anarchist seeking a gaudy martyrdom, with pictures of himself in the papers, would hardly apply there, I think [MTP: TS: Caroline Harnsberger, Everyone’s Mark Twain 33-4]
June, after 25th – Sam wrote the essay, “A Scrap of Curious History” in La Bourboule-les-Bains, France after the learning of the assassination of French president Sadi Carnot on June 24. The piece was published Oct. 1914 in Harper’s Magazine. It began:
Marion City, on the Mississippi River, in the State of Missouri — a village; time, 1845. La Bourboule-les-Bains, France — a village; time, the end of June, 1894. I was in the one village in that early time; I am in the other now. These times and places are sufficiently wide apart, yet today I have the strange sense of being thrust back into that Missourian village and of reliving certain stirring days that I lived there so long ago. [Note: may be found in Neider’s The Complete Essays of Mark Twain p.517].