January 27 Sunday – The New York Times, p.27, “Mark Twain’s New Volume” praised the illustrations in the book version of Pudd’nhead Wilson, and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins, published on Nov. 28, 1894. The Century installments were illustrated by Louis Loeb. Frank Bliss hired two little-known illustrators for the book, F.M. Senior and C.H. Warren, who came up with 432 drawings to be used in the margins [1996 Oxford ed. “Reading the Illustrations, etc.” by Beverly R. David & Ray Sapirstein]. Note: Senior and Warren were also part of a team that would illustrate Following the Equator.

The New York Sun, sec. 3, p.4 ran “Mark Twain in Paris,” a longish interview [Scharnhorst, Interviews 145-8]. Subjects covered were the Pomroy house the Clemenses rented at 169 rue de l’Université in Paris (misspelled as “Pomeroy” which leads Scharnhorst to conclude the reference is “a joke at the expense of Marcus (Brick) Pomeroy (1833-96), a popular journalist and real estate promoter.” See listings under “Pomroy”. In the interview the unnamed reporter remarked, “Perhaps we lose the quality of the French humor as completely as they lose the quality of yours,” to which Sam answered “Oh, unquestionably.”

“As for humor, well,” wheeling round suddenly, “I don’t think any nation that has a sense of humor would go around sniveling over that great Russian bear the way France has been doing. If they could see themselves — but it is like a drunkard. Everybody knows that if a man who gets drunk could once see himself when he is drunk he’d never do it again.

“The French are simply drunk; that’s all. …You wouldn’t find America playing the ridiculous part that France has in this Russian craze, and it is for such reasons that I think Americans have a better sense of humor than Frenchmen.”