September 30 Thursday – At the Hotel Metropole in Vienna, Austria Sam wrote to Mrs. Laura Rothmann, thanking her for an advertisement sent on a rental house in Vienna by du Möblirte Wohnŭng.

Her note (not extant) had been delayed, but Sam wrote they would go tomorrow to look at the house, as we shall prefer housekeeping to boarding if we can situate ourselves satisfactorily” [MTP]. See Oct. 1 entry.

Dolmetsch writes of the sensation that Mark Twain’s arrival in Vienna caused in the press:

Newspapers in Vienna began trumpeting “the famous American humorist’s presence inside our walls,’ as one daily put it, on the front pages of evening editions on September 30, 1897. First on line were the Neues Wiener Tagblatt and Neue Freie Presse, the two largest, the latter reporting that “the well-known American humorist…who is famous throughout the civilized world by his pen-name, Mark Twain, has been in the city for two days and had an apartment in the Hotel Metropole,” adding that he had been prevented by an unnamed infirmity (soon reported as gout) from leaving the hotel despite the “splendid summer-like weather” which had set in after the Clemenses’ drizzly arrival. Within days almost every paper in the metropolis contained a similar article, some offering biographical sketches with inaccurate or downright fanciful details and several with a drawing or photograph of the author. Before long, Twain’s visage became almost as familiar to the Viennese as that of their new mayor, Dr. Karl Lueger, or the hotly controversial new opera director, Gustav Mahler [32-3]. Note: the writer also points out these articles resulted in “a deluge of letters from sympathetic gout sufferers.”