March 31, 1899 Friday
March 31 Friday – At the Hotel Krantz in Vienna, Austria, Sam began a letter to Frank Bliss, that he added to on Apr. 2. Included were notes of a biographical sketch of Clemens from which Samuel E. Moffett might write the finished article.
I want SET NO 1 of the DE LUXE edition to go to Mr. Rogers, & to be charged to me (minus agent’s commission.)
March 30, 1899 Thursday
March 30 Thursday – At the Hotel Krantz in Vienna, Austria Sam signed sheets for the deluxe Uniform editions which had arrived prior to leaving for Budapest. He shipped them to Frank Bliss by “the best express-firm in Vienna” [Mar. 31 to Bliss].
March 28, 1899 Tuesday
March 28 Tuesday – The Clemens family’s last full day in Budapest, Hungary. On one of their days in Budapest Ferenc Kossuth (1841-1914), leader of the Independence Party in the Hungarian Parliament, called at their hotel. Dolmetsch: “Clemens had heard Lajos Kossuth [Ferenc’s father, a Hungarian hero] lecture in St. Louis in the late 1850s on one of the barnstorming tours of the United States, and like most Americans, the Clemenses venerated this great ‘Champion of Liberty’” [59].
March 27, 1899 Monday
March 27 Monday – In Budapest, Hungary, Sam sent an aphorism to an unidentified person:“It is not easy for us to bear prosperity. (Another man’s, I mean.) / Truly Yours / Mark Twain / March 27, 1899” [MTP].
Sam also wrote to Bertha von Suttner to decline an invitation (not extant) of some sort. He was booked only for one engagement in April and after that he would take a holiday for the season [MTP].
March 26, 1899 Sunday
March 26 Sunday – In Budapest, Hungary Sam and his daughters went sightseeing, leaving Livy behind at the hotel with flu-like symptoms. There were many modern features of Budapest, a city of 800,000 with a quarter of those Jews, “even more assimilated and less discriminated against than the Jews of Vienna…” Budapest boasted the first electric streetcars in Europe and the first subway of any city, which would become a model for New York’s subway system.
March 25, 1899 Saturday
March 25 Saturday – Budapest, Hungary. Magyar Hirlap ran an article about Sam’s activities the day before, including Sam joking about bringing something to every place he ever visited: cholera to the Sandwich Islands, starvation to India, the jubilee of the Queen to England, and filibustering to Vienna; the paper added scarlet fever to Australia [Katona 112].
March 24, 1899 Friday
March 24 Friday – The Clemens family awoke to a blanket of snow in Budapest, Hungary. The family headed out for some sightseeing in spite of the weather. First they attended the visitors’ gallery of the new Parliament building. When they entered the chamber “all eyes turned to the celebrities.” Livy and her daughters had caught cold so returned after lunch to the hotel (Katona calls their malady “a touch of the flu” p.111).
March 22, 1899 Wednesday
March 22 Wednesday – At the Hotel Krantz in Vienna, Austria, Sam replied to Poultney Bigelow and his invitation to get together (not extant).
Of course I should like it ever so much—it goes without saying—but if I see England by the middle of September that is the earliest I can hope for.
March 16, 1899 Thursday
March 16 Thursday – At the Hotel Krantz in Vienna, Austria, Sam wrote to Chatto & Windus, asking his help in collecting £100 for an article of 2,000 words sent to a Mr. Bussy some three weeks after Bussy had published it. Sam had an idea to ask the Society of Authors to try to collect it, but he had lost G. Herbert Thring’s address.