ght-seeing of his
own kind, and once went up in a captive balloon. They were all studying
French, more or less, and they read histories and other books relating
to France. Clemens renewed his old interest in Joan of Arc, and for the
first time appears to have conceived the notion of writing the story of
that lovely character.

The Reign of Terror interested him. He reread Carlyle's Revolution, a
book which he was never long without reading, and they all read 'A Tale
of Two Cities'. When the weather permitted they visited the scenes of
that grim period.

In his note-book he comments:

"The Reign of Terror shows that, without distinction or rank, the
people were savages. Marquises, dukes, lawyers, blacksmiths, they
each figure in due proportion to their crafts."

And again:

"For 1,000 years this savage nation indulged itself in massacre;
every now and then a big massacre or a little one. The spirit is
peculiar to France--I mean in Christendom--no other state has had
it. In this France has always walked abreast, kept her end up with
her brethren, the Turks and the Burmese. Their chief traits--love
of glory and massacre."

Yet it was his sense of fairness that made him write, as a sort of
quittance:

"You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances.
It is the tourists' custom. When I see a man jump from the Vendome
Column I say, 'They like to do that in Paris.'"

Following this implied atonement, he records a few conclusions, drawn
doubtless from Parisian reading and observation:

"Childish race and great."

"I'm for cremation."

"I disfavor capital punishment."

"Samson was a Jew, therefore not a fool. The Jews have the best
average brain of any people in the world. The Jews are the only
race in the world who work wholly with their brains, and never with
their hands. There are no Jew beggars, no Jew tramps, no Jew
ditchers, hod-carriers, day-laborers, or followers of toilsome
mechanical trade.

"They are peculiarly and conspicuously the world's intellectual
aristocracy."

"Communism is idiocy. They want to divide up the property. Suppose
they did it. It requires brains to keep money as well as to make
it. In a precious little while the money would be back in the
former owner's hands and the communist would be poor again. The
division would have to be remade every three years