May 3 Saturday – One of the greatest attractions of the 1878 Paris Exposition was Henry Giffard’s captive balloon in the Tuileries of Paris. Lucius Fairchild invited the Clemens family to go up in the balloon. Sam wrote and declined due to a previous engagement.  

O, dear, we should like it of all things,—it commends itself to us both as just the excursion to make—but unhappily there is a breakfast engagement in the way, for 12.30 tomorrow in Paris. So we can only thank you cordially for offering us this pleasant opportunity & dam the fates for robbing us of it. (That word is not profane, as you will observe by the spelling) …Mrs. Clemens objects to that word—but she has no poetic feeling [MTLE 4: 53].

Sam would get another invite and go aloft on June 23. See entry.