January 21 Monday – At 169 rue de l’Université in Paris, Sam wrote to H.H. Rogers.

Yours of the 8th is received.

That is the very thing. If you will write that sort of a letter to [Bram] Stoker, I’ll be very glad, and will keep diligently aloof myself.

Meantime the thing for me to do is to begin to teach myself to endure a way of life which I was familiar with during the first half of my life but whose sordidness and hatefulness and humiliation long ago faded out of my memory and feeling. With the help of my wife this will not be very difficult, I think. I think, indeed, that she and I could adjust ourselves to the new conditions quite easily if we were alone, — in fact I know it — but the reflection that they are going to be hard on the children (and incomprehensible by them) will string out the probation of course. The first step has been taken: we have written to Hartford and offered our house for rent. With that idle and expensive institution off our hands we think we can pull along somehow — not in America, perhaps, but in Paris or Vienna.

Of the rags left of Mrs. Clemens’s Elmira interests she may count upon $3,000 a year for herself and $1,000 for the children. Then there is about $1,500 a year from the Hartford books and $2,000 from the London publisher — total, $7,500. To that I must add $5,000 a year by work, and that will keep the tribe alive.

Sam felt he should not overexpose his name by too many magazine articles and wrote of being offered $1,000 for a short story by the Bachellor & Johnson Syndicate of N.Y., then writing a 6,200 word story overnight and not liking the results. He ruled out N.Y. as a place for them to live since “Mrs. Clemens is not strong enough to walk the distances that lie between the horse-car lines.” They didn’t wish to live anywhere else in the U.S., “certainly not in Hartford, in the circumstances.” Their plans were to return to the US and Quarry Farm in May, where he might work on the Uniform Edition of his works, hoping to issue them the following January, preceded by JA in December of 1895.

Sam also suggested a “conspiracy against the gullibility of the world,” with a contest prize of $1,000 for people to supply a missing word in the following paragraph:

Man is like a ______: welcomed and courted when he is young and rich; courteously but earnestly avoided when he is old and stale. Address XXX, Herald office until Feb. 28.

The plan involved the hint of a swindle about the contest and purposely having Clarence Rice or H.H. Rogers arrested! [MTHHR 119-21].

Arthur Waugh wrote to Sam on letterhead, 21 Bedford Street, London. thanking for Sam’s “kind and courteous letter”. Waugh asked if Mr. Bacheller might have “a provisional promise of a story within, say, six or nine months. I know he is very anxious to secure work from your pen” [MTP].