September 19 Sunday – In Weggis, Switzerland Sam wrote to Robert Barr, editor of The Idler:

Dear Robert : / When I got back from the pier I took up A Woman Intervenes, to read until the family should be ready to go boating; but they were a little tardy, & by the time that Mrs. Clemens came for me I was past Chapter 7. If engagements are to be kept, they must be kept before Chapter 8; for after that point they will be violated. One is in the rush of the story, then, & cannot get ashore any more until the end. He is helpless. The fascinations of the tale are stronger than his promises & his principles. I read through to the end without stopping (& without skipping a line.) And yet my custom is to skip liberally. The style is what I have been talking about these several recent days: honest, simple, straight-forward, unostentatious, unruffled; barren of impertinences, & familiarities; dignified, refined, self-respectful, & respectful toward the reader; bright, snappy, humorous, moving; & the story flows from the sources to the mouth without a break—& stays between the banks all the way, too. The characters are alive, & are distinctly discriminated. If I have seemed to offer you any advice in the literary trade, I take it back. If I have made myself clear, you will see that I have had great pleasure in this book.

You have left a large emptiness here; the tribe & I send our warm regards & wish you were back to fill it.

Sincerely yours [Sotheby’s catalog, sale of June 19, 2003, Lot 89].

Note: A Woman Intervenes, or, The Mistress of the Mind by Robert Barr (1896). The MTP has recently changed the catalog date of this froms 20 ? September to 16? September; Sam’s heading, “Weggis, next day, 1897,” puts it logically a day after his Sept. 18 thank-you note. Sam’s expression of a “large emptiness” that Barr had left bespeaks of a stay in Weggis; Barr’s visit prior to Sept 18 has not been dated.

Sometime before leaving Weggis, Sam had advised the American Embassy in Vienna that he wished to find a furnished house or flat in the city [Dolmetsch 26].

The Clemens party left Weggis, Switzerland and took an overnight train trip to Innsbruck, Austria by way of Lucerne and Zürich, some 150 miles [23].