November 16 Friday – At the Brighton Hotel in Paris, Sam wrote three paragraphs to Franklin G. Whitmore, the first about attending to the rugs in the Hartford house; the second to advise when he needed money for the household expenses there to apply to Rogers’ legal firm of Stern & Rushmore because the money from the American Publishing Co. (PW ) went to them; the third was a brief progress report on the rental house he would go to in one hour.

I am on my back the past 5 days with a formidable attack of gout in my off hind leg-ankle joint. In an hour from now I am to get up & be carted in a close carriage to the above address — our quarters for the winter. It is not a flat, but a small house by itself, & it seems a comfortable & homelike place. Home like, for the reason that an American furnished it; consequently it is not a museum of infernal colors, tasteless, “decorations” & odious furniture [MTP].

Sam was then bundled up and carted to the family’s rental house, the artists’ studio home at 169 rue de l’Université; he went straight to bed. Paine gives us Sam’s description of the house:

It was a lovely house; large, rambling, quaint, charmingly furnished and decorated, built upon no particular plan, delightfully uncertain and full of surprises. You were always getting lost in it, and finding nooks and corners which you did not know were there and whose presence you had not suspected before. It was built by a rich French artist, and he had also furnished it and decorated it himself. The studio was coziness itself. With us it served as a drawing-room, sitting-room, living-room, dancing-room — we used it for everything. We couldn’t get enough of it. It is odd that it should have been so cozy, for it was 40 feet long, 40 feet high, and 30 feet wide, with a vast fireplace on each side, in the middle, and a musicians’ gallery at one end [MTB 989-90].