Livy in Florence DBD

March 22 Tuesday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto near Florence Sam added a PS to his Mar. 21 to H.H. Rogers.

March 23 Wednesday – This day saw the formation of the English Congo Reform Association by Dr. Henry Grattan Guinness (1861-1915); Edmund Dene Morel (1873-1924), British journalist, author and socialist politician; and Roger Casement (1864 -1916), Irish patriot, poet and British consul. Casement’s 1904 report on the Congo led to demands for action and the formation of the Assoc. Ultimately, the investigations led to the 1908 formation of the Belgian Congo.

March 24 Thursday – Miss Jennie Listenauer wrote from Superior, Wisc. to Sam, having been told a yarn of St. Ignace, Wisc., where Mark Twain was supposedly buried! [MTP].

March 25 Friday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto near Florence Sam wrote to John Y. MacAlister.

March 26 Saturday – Sam’s notebook: “Countess Montjoye” [NB 47 TS 7]. Note: this may be Alice Ann Lymer Monck (d. 1905), the widow of Count Montjoy, Richard Charles Stanley Montjoy Monck (1858-1892).

James Douglas Campbell for the Plasmon Co. of America wrote to inform Sam of a stockholders’ meeting on Apr. 28, 1904 at 2:30 p.m in the company offices, 116 Broad St. NYC [MTP].

March 27 Sunday – Mrs. E.H. Higinbotham wrote from Florence to Sam, asking if she might call and pay her respects. She was the bride of the wedding Sam had mentioned at the St. Louis Club in 1902; She remembered him as saying that “Mr. Papeu [sp?] had been guilty of a great oversight in having failed to be the prospective bridegroom” [MTP].

Dr. Giovanni Nesti wrote to Sam, thanking for his “kind letter with the cheque” [MTP]. Note: See Mar. 20 for Nesti’s itemized bill.

March 28 Monday – Sam’s notebook: “Began dictating again, after an interval of 2 months” [NB 47 TS 7].

Elisabeth Marbury wrote to Sam, enclosing a financial statement and a check for $32.71 for one week’s performance of PW [MTP].

James Douglas Campbell for the Plasmon Co. of America wrote to Sam, enclosing a proxy form for him to use for the upcoming stockholders’ meeting [MTP].

March 29 Tuesday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto near Florence Sam wrote to Thomas Bailey Aldrich in Ponkapog, Mass. (only the envelope survives) [MTP].

Sam’s notebook: “Clara’s consert. (postponed)” [NB 47 TS 7].

March 3 Thursday – Dr. H. Laing Gordon for the British Relief Fund wrote the gratitude of the committee to Sam and those who helped with the performance of Cousin Kate [MTP].

Ubaldo Traverso, Florence attorney, wrote to Sam that he was required to give evidence in a case before the court in Berlin. “To avoid the inconvenience of appearing on the 7th ins., I have asked Dr. Kirch to send me a medical certificate to the effect that you are unable to come to Florence for some days” [MTP].

March 31 Thursday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto near Florence Sam wrote to Elizabeth Robins.

“The passage quoted by me is from William Morris’s ‘Well at the End of the World.’ It occurs in the second volume, but I do not know just where, for the book is not now on the premises. / With kindest regards” [MTP].

March 4 Friday – Sam’s notebook: “Apparently they finished cleaning the cesspools to-day. They have been several days at it. / Suddenly at 4 p.m. Smith brought word from Higgs that he had promised the Aurora to a lady unless I decided to-night to take it. / I think we don’t wish to be hurled into it” [NB 47 TS 7]. Note: Sam was still trying to lease another villa.

March 5 Saturday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto near Florence Sam began a letter to George B. Harvey that he added a few lines to on Mar. 6.

Won’t you run over here & give us a glimpse of you? And can’t you pull Howells along, too? Would God I could put you up, but in this majestic barrack with its inumerable rooms there is not a spare chamber which one self-respecting American would offer to another. But we’ll feed you, & drink you thereto, & be glad of the chance.

March 6 Sunday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto near Florence Sam finished his Mar. 5 to George B. Harvey. “March 6. All night I had flittings through my head of the thought ‘the idea of that old rake fetching up in Bath, that place so full of ghosts of other Beaux—& now we add Beau Howells’” [MTP].

Sam’s notebook: “I was out of bed 2 hours to-day, the first time in 12 or 15 days. Bronchitis” [NB 47 TS 7].

March 7 Monday – E.Y. Elliot wrote from San Francisco to ask for Sam’s autograph [MTP].

Dorothy Williams, “an earnest student of astrology,” wrote from Phila. Pa. to ask Sam if she might do his horoscope—what was the hour and day of his birth? “Answer to wit: Date, Nov. 30,/35 hour not known /Ans. Mar. 21, 1904” [MTP].

Ida White wrote from Brighton, England to thank Sam for his autograph received [MTP].

March 8 Tuesday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto near Florence Sam wrote to Susan Crane.

May 10 Tuesday – Henry Morton Stanley, the great explorer and one of Sam’s oldest friends, died in London. They first met on Mar. 26, 1867 in St. Louis (see entry), with Stanley, then a reporter, taking in one of Mark Twain’s lectures. See May 11 for Sam’s note to the widow Stanley. As with any news that might disturb Livy, Sam withheld it from her.

May 11 Wednesday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto near Florence Sam wrote to Dorothy T. Stanley, widow of Henry M. Stanley.

May 12 Thursday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto near Florence Sam wrote a letter to Richard Watson Gilder that he added to on May 13.

May 13 Friday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto near Florence Sam finished his May 12 to Richard

Watson Gilder.

“May 13, 10 a.m. I have just paid one of my pair of permitted 2-minute-visits-per-day to the sickroom. And found what I have learned to expect—retrogression. Blue lips, the pallor of the dead, & that pathetic something in the eye which betrays the secret of a waning hope” [MTP].

May 14 Saturday – The Italian Gazette of May 17 reported:

Mr. S.L. Clemens was the honored guest of the Ponte Vecchio Club at the usual Saturday dinner last week…“Mark Twain”…proceeded to tell an excellent story of how he drove an unwilling man into matrimony [“Wapping Alice”; quoted in Hill, p.83; See Keene’s letter of Apr. 28 about this club].

May 15 Sunday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto Sam wrote to Dr. William Wilberforce Baldwin.

I hope that you will come with your mind & conscience all prepared to commit a lofty & righteous deception—if need be—to save Mrs. Clemens’s life. Tell her you want to make a more thorough examination by the light, of the past few days’ regime, & then tell her there is nothing the matter with her heart that need alarm her.

May 17 Tuesday – Frederick A. Duneka wrote to Sam, letting him know that Mark Twain day at the St. Louis Fair had been postponed until some time in September. The Fair wasn’t yet “an overwhelming success” but it was early. He asked Sam to send his portrait (the Gelli painting) so they might display it “in a splendid window in Fifth Avenue just below the Holland House” [MTP].

May 18 Wednesday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto, Sam replied to Father Nicholas Miale.

Your kind letter of yesterday has reached me, & its friendly spirit & the compliments you pay me in it have greatly gratified me. The newspaper which you have mentioned has not arrived yet, but it will come along presently.

May 19 Thursday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto near Florence Sam wrote to Dr. William Wilberforce Baldwin in Rome.

Mrs. Clemens, with characteristic sharpness has hunted the mystery down & found out that it is proposed to have the Swiss surgeon make an examination with a view to an operation. She votes against it, & of course that settles it, for I would not want to take the responsibility of trying to persuade her. She wants me to thank you, but also to ask you not to bring Dr. Corka (if that is the name.)

May – Bookman (NY), p. 235-6, ran Harry Thurston Peck’s article, “Mark Twain at Ebb Tide.” Tenney: “A review of Extracts from Adam’s Diary as showing ‘just how far a man who was once a great humorist can fall. We thought when we read A Double-Barrelled Detective Story that Mark Twain could do no worse. But we were wrong’” [40].

Harper’s Weekly ran an interview with Mark Twain by J. M’Arthur [Tenney 39: Henderson (1911) p. 223].