Sam also wrote an account of the trip he called “part diary and part comment,” titled, “Down the Rhône,” which was first published in 1923 in Europe and Elsewhere. The account begins on this day:
Scott, Arthur L. “The Innocents Adrift Edited by Mark Twain's Official Biographer.”
September 5 Saturday – Sam’s notebook: Sept. 5. Left Heidelberg for Lucerne 8.50 a.m. [NB 31 TS 3].
September 9 Wednesday – Left Lucerne by boat, 9.45 a.m. Left Alpnach in two carriages at 10.45. Lunched at the Lion d’Or, at 1. p.m.; passed through Brienz mid-afternoon; glimpsed a small white peak of the Jungfrau at 6.10; at 6.30 the vast pile was in full view & from then till 7.10 it was richly tinted with pink, the other mountains very dark, nearly black. Meantime, reached Victoria Hotel, Interlaken 6.30 [NB 31 TS 4].
“They returned to Germany at the end of August, to Nuremberg, which he notes as the ‘city of exquisite glimpses,’ and to Heidelberg, where they had their old apartment of thirteen years before, Room 40 at the Schloss Hotel, with its wonderful prospect of wood and hill, and the haze-haunted valley of the Rhine. They remained less than a week in that beautiful place, and then were off for Switzerland, Lucerne, Brienz, Interlaken, finally resting at the Hotel Beau Rivage, Ouchy, Lausanne, on beautiful Lake Leman” [MTB 923]. (Editorial emphasis.)
Of the trip from Bayreuth to Marienbad, Schornhorst (pg 7) writes: "The family left Bayreuth on August 11 and railed some sixty miles east to Marienbad, in Bohemia, where they spent the remained of the month. Sam was so enchanted by the landscape along the route; he had "never made so picturesque a journey before," ... " and there cannot be another trip of the like in the world that can furnish so much variety and of so charming and interesting sort."
The Wagner Opera festival opened in Bayreuth [Brooklyn Eagle, July 19, 1891 p.7]. This paper reported in a dispatch from London, “Bayreuth is overflowing with visitors, fully 50 per cent of them being Americans.” The Clemens party would arrive there on July 31 [July 10 to Hall]. The festival was held each year in the town of Wagner’s birth. Performances were given in a theater designed by Wagner in 1872, the Festspielhaus, with excellent acoustics.
From June 21 to June 27, 1891, Sam was in Annecy. I have found no direct mention of where the Clemens' were while at Haute-Savoie but it is possible they tried the Thermes de Sant Gervais Mont-Blanc. From June 27 to July 27, 1891, he was at Aix-les-Bains. Scharnhorst reports they departed for Geneva on the 28th.
June 5 Friday – Sam, Livy, and Jean left Hartford for New York, where they met their other daughters and Sue Crane. The party stayed at the Murray Hill Hotel.
New York to France: Gascoigne
June 6 Saturday – At 5 a.m. the Clemenses sailed from New York for France on the Gascoigne. The family would not return for more than eight years and would never again live in Hartford.
George Washington Cable and Samuel L. Clemens first met in 1881. It appeared that he stood at the threshold of a brilliant career. (pg3 Cardwell). Cable had just caught the attention of the public with his two fresh, promising volumes [from 1879 and 1880]. Although his thinking on questions of race and caste had taken a liberal bias in the 1860's he was not yet marked as a forthright, vocal advocate of civil rights for the Negro and had not yet been widely attacked by southerners for the nonconformist views which were to make him notorious and obnoxious among them. (pg2 Cardwell).
AFTER twenty-one years' absence, I felt a very strong desire to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left; so I resolved to go out there. I enlisted a poet for company, and a stenographer to 'take him down,' and started westward about the middle of April.
They dallied in Liverpool for two days, and then boarded the newly commissioned Cunard steamer Gallia, “a very fine ship.” Coincidentally, they sailed with Sams friend the Earl of Dunraven, “an uncommonly clever fellow.” During the transatlantic voyage, the body of a passenger who had died en route was packed in ice and stored in a lifeboat, and Sam added a grisly note to this news in his notebook: “the hilarious Passengers sing & laugh & joke under him” as “the melting ice drips on them.” The family landed in New York on September 2 after a tour that had lasted nearly eighteen mont