rant seemed to doubt whether he could honorably withdraw from
the negotiation at that point, but Clemens overbore his scruples, and it
was his unparalleled privilege, his princely pleasure, to pay the author
a far larger check for his work than had ever been paid to an author
before. He valued even more than this splendid opportunity the sacred
moments in which their business brought him into the presence of the
slowly dying, heroically living man whom he was so befriending; and he
told me in words which surely lost none of their simple pathos through
his report how Grant described his suffering.

The prosperity, of this venture was the beginning of Clemens's adversity,
for it led to excesses of enterprise which were forms of dissipation. The
young sculptor who had come back to him from Paris modelled a small bust
of Grant, which Clemens multiplied in great numbers to his great loss,
and the success of Grant's book tempted him to launch on publishing seas
where his bark presently foundered. The first and greatest of his
disasters was the Life of Pope Leo XIII, which he came to tell me of,
when he had imagined it, in a sort of delirious exultation. He had no
words in which to paint the magnificence of the project, or to forecast
its colossal success. It would have a currency bounded only by the
number of Catholics in Christendom. It would be translated into every
language which was anywhere written or printed; it would be circulated
literally in every country of the globe, and Clemens's book agents would
carry the prospectuses and then the bound copies of the work to the ends
of the whole earth. Not only would every Catholic buy it, but every
Catholic must, as he was a good Catholic, as he hoped to be saved. It
was a magnificent scheme, and it captivated me, as it had captivated
Clemens; it dazzled us both, and neither of us saw the fatal defect in
it. We did not consider how often Catholics could not read, how often
when they could, they might not wish to read. The event proved that
whether they could read or not the immeasurable majority did not wish to
read the life of the Pope, though it was written by a dignitary of the
Church and issued to the world with every sanction from the Vatican. The
failure was incredible to Clemens; his sanguine soul was utterly
confounded, and soon a silence fell upon it where it had been so
exuberantly jubilant.

XIX.

The occasions which brought us to New York together were not