single flashing sentence, the whole human horizon.

CXXI. PARIS, ENGLAND, AND HOMEWARD BOUND

They decided to spend the spring months in Paris, so they gave up their
pleasant quarters with Fraulein Dahlweiner, and journeyed across Europe,
arriving at the French capital February 28, 1879. Here they met another
discouraging prospect, for the weather was cold and damp, the cabmen
seemed brutally ill-mannered, their first hotel was chilly, dingy,
uninviting. Clemens, in his note-book, set down his impressions of their
rooms. A paragraph will serve:

Ten squatty, ugly arm-chairs, upholstered in the ugliest and
coarsest conceivable scarlet plush; two hideous sofas of the same
--uncounted armless chairs ditto. Five ornamental chairs, seats
covered with a coarse rag, embroidered in flat expanse with a
confusion of leaves such as no tree ever bore, six or seven a dirty
white and the rest a faded red. How those hideous chairs do swear
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 interm