r
at the hideous sofa near them! This is the very hatefulest room I
have seen in Europe.

Oh, how cold and raw and unwarmable it is!

It was better than that when the sun came out, and they found happier
quarters presently at the Hotel Normandy, rue de l'Echelle.

But, alas, the sun did not come out often enough. It was one of those
French springs and summers when it rains nearly every day, and is
distressingly foggy and chill between times. Clemens received a bad
impression of France and the French during that Parisian-sojourn, from
which he never entirely recovered. In his note-book he wrote: "France
has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks
it is a fine country."

The weather may not have been entirely accountable for his prejudice, but
from whatever cause Mark Twain, to the day of his death, had no great
love for the French as a nation. Conversely, the French as a nation did
not care greatly for Mark Twain. There were many individual Frenchmen
that Mark Twain admired, as there were many Frenchmen who admired the
work and personality of Mark Twain; but on neither side was there the
warm, fond, general affection which elsewhere throughout Europe he
invited and returned.

His book was not yet finished. In Paris he worked on it daily, but
without enthusiasm. The city was too noisy, the weather too dismal. His
note-book says:

May 7th. I wish this terrible winter would come to an end. Have had
rain almost without intermission for two months and one week.

May 28th. This is one of the coldest days of this most damnable and
interminable winter.

It was not all gloom and discomfort. There was congenial company in
Paris, and dinner-parties, and a world of callers. Aldrich the
scintillating--[ Of Aldrich Clemens used to say: "When Aldrich speaks it
seems to me he is the bright face of the moon, and I feel like the other
side." Aldrich, unlike Clemens, was not given to swearing. The Parisian
note-book has this memorandum: "Aldrich gives his seat in the horse-car
to a crutched cripple, and discovers that what he took for a crutch is
only a length of walnut beading and the man not lame; whereupon Aldrich
uses the only profanity that ever escaped his lips: 'Damn a dam'd man who
would carry a dam'd piece of beading under his dam'd arm!'"]--was there,
also Gedney Bunce, of Hartford, Frank Millet and his wife, Hjalinar
Hjorth Boyesen and his wife, and a Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain, art