November 5 Friday – At the Metropole Hotel, Vienna, Sam wrote to Orion and Mollie Clemens.

“I believe I have nothing to report but the love of the family & their tolerable health. Clara has begun her music lessons, Jean her several studies; Livy is busied in her several ways, & I in mine. The weather is good, & we are comfortable & satisfied. / Sam” [MTP].

With her piano lessons under Theodor Leschetizky under way, Sam and Theodor became friends.

A. Hoffman writes:

Sam found a peer in Theodor Leschetizky, who was in many ways the reason the Clemenses had come to Vienna. Leschetizky was the city’s foremost piano teacher and the man with whom Clara decided to study. Leschetizky led a piano-study pyramid, with more advanced and impecunious pupils teaching the more numerous beginners, such as Clara. As members of his inner social circle, Leschetizky included Sam and Clara in his weekly salons and in his invitations to the concerts of his most notable students. Leschy, as Sam called him, shared Sam’s conversational excellence and habit of monopolizing the attention of a gathering; this similarity, along with his international repute, attracted Clara to him. Leschy also had a reputation for seducing his female students, having married four of them and divorced three. Sam joined Leschy’s circle in part to guard Clara’s honor. Finding twenty- three-year-old Clara a suitable mate was another goal of the Clemenses’ social whirl. Sam dubbed the flurry of interested men who visited Clara at the Hotel Metropole “Delerium Clemens” [421]. Note: A. Scott ascribes this label to Leschetizky [237].

Sam attended the all-night session of the Austrian Parliament, the Reichsrath, which was reported both in the NY Times on Nov. 6, p.7 and the Hartford Courant, Nov. 6, p.1.

The Neue Freie Presse reported “a lengthy convivial chat” between Mark Twain and Otto Lecher , during which Sam promised to be there “from beginning to end” during Lecher’s next twelve-hour speech

[Dolmetsch 74].