December 29 Thursday – Sam wrote on Dec. 30 of Livy’s financial calculations:

Every little while, for these three years, now, Mrs. Clemens has come with pencil & paper & figured up the condition of things (she keeps the accounts & the bank-book) & has proven to me that the clouds were lifting, & so has hoisted my spirits up temporarily & kept me going till another figuring up was necessary. Last night she figured up for her own satisfaction, not mine, & found that we own a house & furniture in Hartford; that my English & American copyrights pay an income which represents $200,000; & that we have $107,000 cash in the bank [Dec. 30 to Howells].

In the evening the Clemenses saw Adolf von Wilbrandt’s tragedy, The Master of Palmyra.”

“We saw the ‘Master of Palmyra’ last night [Dec. 29]. How Death, with his gentleness and majesty, made the human grand-folk around him seem little & trivial & silly!” [MTHL 2: 685-6 & n7].

Note: the source: “Clemens had just seen the play a second time, for he had written an encomium of it in his article ‘About Play-Acting’ for the October Forum (DE, XXIII, 213-225), deploring the failure of the New York theatres to produce tragedies like Willbrandt’s. Certain themes of The Master of Palmyra—especially the confusion between dream and reality, and the problem of identity posed by the successive reincarnations of the principal woman character—occur pervasively in Mark Twain’s later work and dominate The Mysterious Stranger” [n7].