August 12 Wednesday – The last day of the Bayreuth, Germany Wagner festival. Sam was in Marienbad, Germany a few days later, writing from there on Aug. 15. For a humorous account of the trip from Aix-les-Bains to Bayreuth, read Sam’s third letter to McClure’s Syndicate, “Playing the Courier,” which first appeared in the Illustrated London News on Dec. 19 and 26, 1891. Sam later revised the piece and included it in the 1893 collection, The £1,000,000 Bank-Note and Other New Stories.

James Russell Lowell died in Cambridge, Mass. Lowell was one of the Boston “brahmins” and the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

August, last half – Sometime during this period, likely in Marienbad, Germany, Susy Clemens wrote an undated letter to Louise Brownell, complaining,

We are still living a perfectly quiet eventless life. We have not met a soul. I blame myself for being lonely and uninterested, for I fear it is an indication of a lack of resources within myself. We can’t touch the piano till four o’clock on account of the invalids in the house and this leaves us books and walks and we can’t get any good books here….

Oscar Wild[e] was over here the other day in a suit of soft brown with a pale pink flowered vest, a blue necktie and some strange picturesque white flower in his button hole [Cotton 101107-8]. Note: such a complaint would not have been made about Bayreuth and the festival there, nor would Wilde have likely arrived at the more remote Ouchy.