ission 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,
artist people whom the Clemenses had met pleasantly in Italy.
Turgenieff, as in London, came to call; also Baron Tauchnitz, that nobly
born philanthropist of German publishers, who devoted his life, often at
his personal cost, to making the literature of other nations familiar
to his own. Tauchnitz had early published the 'Innocents', following it
with other Mark Twain volumes as they appeared, paying always, of his
own will and accord, all that he could afford to pay for this privilege;
which was not really a privilege, for the law did not require him to pay
at all. He traveled down to Paris now to see the author, and to pay
his respects to him. "A mighty nice old gentleman," Clemens found him.
Richard Whiteing was in Paris that winter, and there were always plenty
of young American painters whom it was good to know.

They had what they called the Stomach Club, a jolly organization, whose
purpose was indicated by its name. Mark Twain occasionally attended its
sessions, and on one memorable evening, when Edwin A. Abbey was there,
speeches were made which never appeared in any printed proceedings. Mark
Twain's address that night has obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs
of the world, though no line of it, or even its title has ever found its
way into published literature.

Clemens had a better time in Paris than the rest of his party. He could
go and come, and mingle with the sociabilities when the abnormal weather
kept the others housed in. He did a good deal of si