January 18 Wednesday – At the Villa Viviani, Settignano, near Florence, Sam wrote to Mary Mason Fairbanks, who had moved to Boston to be with her daughter. Sam tells of the family:

We are glad you are all back nearer to us, & shall hope to have visits in our house when we get back — which will be by & by, we don’t know when, yet; it may take Clara another year to finish her musical studies in Berlin. She has made great progress & wants to continue. She is in Mrs. Willard’s school of American girls & is having a marvelously good time.

Which I’m afraid Susy isn’t, for she is with us away out here on the hills overlooking Florence….Susy goes to the theatre & the opera, & that helps to ease the dullness of eternal study. …

Jean is a big girl, now, though still a child — 12½. She is a colt for play & out-door activities, and a fanatic for indoor study. When she talks German it is a German talking — manner & all; when she talks French she is French — gestures, shrugs & all, & she is entirely at home in both tongues. She is getting a good start in Italian & will make it her property presently.

The news on Livy was much the same as always — she wasn’t completely healthy, though Sam felt she was making progress.

He confided to “Mother” Fairbanks, the only person he’d told about the book “written for love” that he was in the middle of Joan of Arc. He noted that Livy’s and Susy’s opinion of the book so far would win her approbation [MTMF 268-70]. Note: this last item suggests he began the actual drafting of the book sometime in late 1892, though he’d collected materials for it for at least a decade.