Page 409-10 The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871:
They left the ship in Marseilles on July 4 and, to escape the dust while it was recoaling, registered at the Grand Hotel de Louvre et de la Paix, where they first encountered the French system of hostelry. As Jackson explained in a letter dated July 5,
The great governing principles of the hotel system here is that the guest pays for just what he gets, which is clearly right and proper. But every item, even the most minute, is found in your bill. If you order a bath, you are shown to the bath room and find besides the bath-tub and the water, nothing in the way of necessary conveniences except a couple of towels. If you wish soap you call for it and it appears in your bill as an extra charge. Combs and brushes are not furnished at all. If you desire them, you call the waiter and, if you make him understand your unusual wish, he proceeds to the proper authority and obtains permission to go out and purchase them for you. So that unless you go properly prepared for the operation, the taking of a bath in France is a rather serious matter, All this results, I presume, from the fact that the French people rarely wash themselves lower down than the shirt collar,
Paris: On July 6 Sam, Jackson, and Slote took a train to Paris for several days of sightseeing. They registered at the Grand Hétel du Louvre on the rue de Rivoli and hired a guide to escort them around the city. Surprisingly, they explored the Exposition Universelle, the world’s fair that had originally attracted Sam to Europe, for only a couple of hours one afternoon. Instead they kept up a frenetic schedule touring other sites. They frequented “all the great churches [including Notre Dame] and museums, libraries, imperial palaces, the sculpture and picture galleries,” including the Louvre as well as the Tuileries, the Morgue, the tomb of Napoleon, the Madeleine, the Pantheon, and the Jardin Mabille, a so-called pleasure garden located in the fashionable neighborhood of Faubourg Saint-Honoré. There Sam first observed—ostensibly while peering through his spread fingers—a performance of the cancan, a dance he thought almost as lascivious as the hula. After all, the “idea of it is to dance as wildly, as noisily, as furiously as you can; expose yourself as much as possible” and “kick as high as you can,”