June 23 Wednesday – At 23 Tedworth Square in London, Sam wrote to H.H. Rogers.

I wrote the enclosed interview to-day, intending to have it cabled to the N.Y. Journal, but Mrs. Clemens will not allow it. She said I must not advertise the fact that the Herald scheme was a failure. She made me write to Bennett in Paris Last Saturday [June 19] & ask him to stop the scheme & return the money. I didn’t want to; for, failure or no failure, I wanted to see how the scheme would fare. To my mind there was nothing discreditable about it, whether it failed or succeeded. Bennett is probably off yachting somewhere, & I hope he is; for it is late in the day, now, to enter Mrs. Clemens’s protest—the scheme will die before this week is out, of pure inanition.

Sam added that he’d been offered “a third more per page than it [a magazine] had ever offered before.” Rather tongue-in-cheek he suggested Rogers “collect” $ 40,000 from himself, then pay it back to himself, and have somebody tell the press it was collected but by Mrs. Clemens’s desire Sam had asked it be returned and that it was done. He shared plans for travel.

Mrs. Clemens is to have an operation performed next Friday [June 25]. We shall start for Switzerland a week later, & leave there for Vienna early in September.

The Jubilee has worn everybody out. It will end to-night, & I shall be glad, for it has cost me considerable labor & fatigue [MTHHR 285-8]. Note: The enclosed “interview” was one Sam no doubt concocted, reacting to the relief fund for him. Delayed, the family left for Switzerland on July 13.

AMERICANS SEE THE PARADE.

Chauncey M. Depew, George Gould, and Mark Twain in London.

LONDON, June 22.—Chauncey M. Depew witnessed the procession as the guest of the Baroness Burdett Coutts, George Gould, Mrs. Gould, and the members of their family, from the Savoy Hotel, while Mark Twain, Mr. M.H. De Young, and Mrs. De Young, with Mrs. and Miss Deane of San Francisco, looked on from the Hotel Cecil.

This evening her Majesty gave a family dinner party in the state supper room of Buckingham Palace at a quarter to nine. All the members of the royal family were present, as well as all the royal guests. Their suites dined in the garden vestibule [NY Times, p.2, June 23, 1897].

The San Francisco Examiner, p. 1 and 4, published more from Sam on Queen Victoria’s Jubilee: “All Nations Pay Homage to Victoria.” It was reprinted in the 1923 Europe and Elsewhere [AMT-1: 706]. Note: see also June 20.