March 27 Monday – In Budapest, Hungary, Sam sent an aphorism to an unidentified person:“It is not easy for us to bear prosperity. (Another man’s, I mean.) / Truly Yours / Mark Twain / March 27, 1899” [MTP].
Sam also wrote to Bertha von Suttner to decline an invitation (not extant) of some sort. He was booked only for one engagement in April and after that he would take a holiday for the season [MTP].
March 26 Sunday – In Budapest, Hungary Sam and his daughters went sightseeing, leaving Livy behind at the hotel with flu-like symptoms. There were many modern features of Budapest, a city of 800,000 with a quarter of those Jews, “even more assimilated and less discriminated against than the Jews of Vienna…” Budapest boasted the first electric streetcars in Europe and the first subway of any city, which would become a model for New York’s subway system.
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].
March 24 Friday – The Clemens family awoke to a blanket of snow in Budapest, Hungary. The family headed out for some sightseeing in spite of the weather. First they attended the visitors’ gallery of the new Parliament building. When they entered the chamber “all eyes turned to the celebrities.” Livy and her daughters had caught cold so returned after lunch to the hotel (Katona calls their malady “a touch of the flu” p.111).
March 22 Wednesday – At the Hotel Krantz in Vienna, Austria, Sam replied to Poultney Bigelow and his invitation to get together (not extant).
Of course I should like it ever so much—it goes without saying—but if I see England by the middle of September that is the earliest I can hope for.
March 16 Thursday – At the Hotel Krantz in Vienna, Austria, Sam wrote to Chatto & Windus, asking his help in collecting £100 for an article of 2,000 words sent to a Mr. Bussy some three weeks after Bussy had published it. Sam had an idea to ask the Society of Authors to try to collect it, but he had lost G. Herbert Thring’s address.
March 14 Tuesday – At the Hotel Krantz in Vienna, Austria, Sam wrote to Richard Watson Gilder.
What is it about the “$100 clause” & my “screed on the subject,” & “that wonderful work” of mine? I can’t guess it out—nor Mrs. Clemens. And what is it the Evening Post is attacking? We don’t see the papers in this remote place.
March 12 Sunday – At the Hotel Krantz in Vienna, Austria, Sam added a P.S. to his Mar. 1 and Mar. 11 letter to John Kendrick Bangs:
Please suppress “The Great Republic’s Peanut Stand” till you hear from me again.
March 11 Saturday – At the Hotel Krantz in Vienna, Austria, Sam added to his Mar. 1 letter to John Kendrick Bangs that he finished on Mar. 12.
March 11. I got interrupted there; & have since prepared & delivered a lecture for a charity—it cost me a raft of time.
March 10 Friday – In Vienna, Austria, Sam wrote to Auguste Wilbrandt-Baudius (Mrs. Adolf von Wilbrandt).
“I am rested-up again, & am young again; & as my first pleasure I wish to thank you in the best & heartiest words for taking half my burden off my shoulders, & for so stirring the hearts of those people with the beauty & pathos of your reading; & for saying those gracious things of me.”