From Pages 252-3
They lingered in the university town for eleven weeks. “The summer semester was in full tide,” Sam remembered, so “the most frequent figure in and about Heidelberg was the student.” When he registered with the local authorities to obtain his residency permit or Aufenthaltserlaubnis, he listed his profession as “Philologist and artist.” In a reversion to his interest in the code duello in Nevada, he was especially intrigued by the student corps and their tradition of dueling. Through the agency of Edward M. Smith, the U.S. consul in Mannheim, he was admitted to the students’ dueling hall on May 17 and witnessed eight sword fights. Two spectators fainted, he noted in his journal, and one of the duelists “had a piece of his scalp taken. The others faces so gashed up & floor all covered with blood.” He also noted that in Germany “you can't tell” by facial scars “whether a man is a Franco- Prussian war hero” or “merely has a university education.” But in the end Sam defended the gory rite: “There is blood and pain and danger enough about the college duel to entitle it to a considerable degree of respect,” he insisted in chapter 6 of A Tramp Abroad. The Clemenses occasionally hiked a few hundred yards east from their hotel along the Wolfsbrunnenweg to a hunting lodge that traced its origins back to the fifteenth century where Sam dined on “splendid trout.” They traveled at least once to Worms, some twenty miles distant, where Martin Luther defied a papal edict to renounce his heretical teachings in 1521. One day Smith ushered Sam to three antique stores, “my pet detestation,” to shop for curios but, as he fulminated in his notebook, “I wouldn't have such rubbish in the house. I do hate this antiquarian rot, sham, humbug; cannot keep my temper in such a place & never voluntarily enter one.” Sam and Livy railed ten miles to Mannheim on May 24 to see King Lear performed in German. He “never understood a word but the thunder & lightning,” though he thought “Lear's great speeches sounded mighty flat” in a more guttural tongue. He returned to Mannheim on May 30 to attend a “shivaree,” Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin, with Smith (“the racking and pitiless pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed”). Wagner ever after was a special target of Sam's (sat)ire. When a “great chorus composed entirely of maniacs” suddenly appeared onstage and began to yodel on cue, for two minutes he “lived over again all that I had suffered the time the orphan asylum burned down.” He later famously quoted his friend Bill Nye’s line: “Wagner's music is better than it sounds.” In truth, Sam admired some Wagner pieces—in particular, the bridal chorus or wedding march from Lohengrin. To his “untutored ear” it was “almost divine music.”