March 25 Saturday – Budapest, Hungary. Magyar Hirlap ran an article about Sam’s activities the day before, including Sam joking about bringing something to every place he ever visited: cholera to the Sandwich Islands, starvation to India, the jubilee of the Queen to England, and filibustering to Vienna; the paper added scarlet fever to Australia [Katona 112].
Mark Twain’s 8 p.m. lecture in the great hall of the Lipótvárosi Kaszino was a grand success. Tickets were in great demand. Sam’s notebook entry below shows it was the same he had used in his triumphant lecture on Feb. 1 in Vienna. At the close of his readings, the crowd “erupted in wild enthusiasm”
[Dolmetsch 57].
Sam’s notebook
25th. Read there:
1. Lucerne Girl.
2. Watermelon. 1 hour
(Intermission) &
3. Interviewer 5 minutes
4. Mexican Plug [NB 40 TS 55]
Dolmetsch reviews reaction of the press to Sam’s reading:
Ilona Györy, in the Pesti Hirlap, described the program’s content as “thin” but praised Twain’s “superb platform manner,” as did Pesti Napló, which remarked upon his histrionics and effective sense of timing. Several newspapers, according to [Anna] Katona, were quite skeptical, even sharply critical of the audience’s celebrity madness, Twain’s mingling of German, and his “lack of culture.” Bela Toth, a popular newspaper humorist who was perhaps the Magyar counterpart to Eduard Pötzl, asserted in Pesti Napló that Twain’s peculiarly American brand of humor, not just his language, was alien to the Hungarian mentality. The leading literary weekly, A Hét, hostile as ever, went so far as to allege, apparently without basis, that the sponsors had hired him an “interpreter” to stand behind Twain on the platform and give the audience laugh cues “by twirling his moustache” [57]. Katona points out that “tickets were to be distributed between noon and 2 p.m. on the day of the lecture; they were numbered but non-transferable, and this suggests a selected audience” [112].
Sam also inscribed an aphorism card in a copy of TA to an unidentified person; “ It is best to do everything to-morrow, because it saves so much time to-day. / Truly Yours / Mark Twain / March 25/99” [Bonhams Auction Nov. 23, 2004 Sale 13058, Lot 5137].