Vol 3 Section 0089

June 22, after – Sam’s notebook: included plans for the family’s trip to Switzerland: “L. to Qu 1; to Fl 8 (called 2 ½ in the Co’s ads); to Coln 7; to Zurich 11 — 27 hours.” Note: London to Queenborough Harbor, to Flushing, Belgium; to Cologne to Zurich. Also this entry somewhat later:

The journey from London to Lucerne occupies 27 hours altogether—19 of it by rail, 8 by water. If you sit at home you can make the trip in less time because then you can travel by the steamer Co’s advertisement, & that will take you across the channel five hours quicker than their boats can do it. Almost everywhere in Europe the ads can give the facts several hours odds in the 24 & get in first.

It is an interesting journey; would be an interesting journey even if you were all alone; it is more than that if you take a few trunks 5 or 6 women along enough company & baggage along. It begins at Cook’s offices in L[ondon]. There you buy your tickets & ask a couple thousand questions (& there you buy French money for use in Switzerland)

It used to be the fashion to laugh at Cook’s tourists, years ago, but that is all gone by—everybody is a Cook’s tourist now. In a quarter of a century Cook’s management has changed the whole nature of foreign travel, & made it reasonably easy & convenient in place of difficult & exasperating. You take hotel-coupons— am told it is a great advantage—Cook’s man meets you, & pays your porters, an inestimable advantage, & will save you part of a fortune every day [NB 42 TS 3]. Note: this segment written just after a notation about the Queen’s Jubilee on June 22 and before the family left for Switzerland on July 12, 1897.

June 23 Wednesday – At 23 Tedworth Square in London, Sam wrote to H.H. Rogers.

I wrote the enclosed interview to-day, intending to have it cabled to the N.Y. Journal, but Mrs. Clemens will not allow it. She said I must not advertise the fact that the Herald scheme was a failure. She made me write to Bennett in Paris Last Saturday [June 19] & ask him to stop the scheme & return the money. I didn’t want to; for, failure or no failure, I wanted to see how the scheme would fare. To my mind there was nothing discreditable about it, whether it failed or succeeded. Bennett is probably off yachting somewhere, & I hope he is; for it is late in the day, now, to enter Mrs. Clemens’s protest—the scheme will die before this week is out, of pure inanition.

Sam added that he’d been offered “a third more per page than it [a magazine] had ever offered before.” Rather tongue-in-cheek he suggested Rogers “collect” $ 40,000 from himself, then pay it back to himself, and have somebody tell the press it was collected but by Mrs. Clemens’s desire Sam had asked it be returned and that it was done. He shared plans for travel.

Mrs. Clemens is to have an operation performed next Friday [June 25]. We shall start for Switzerland a week later, & leave there for Vienna early in September.

The Jubilee has worn everybody out. It will end to-night, & I shall be glad, for it has cost me considerable labor & fatigue [MTHHR 285-8]. Note: The enclosed “interview” was one Sam no doubt concocted, reacting to the relief fund for him. Delayed, the family left for Switzerland on July 13.

AMERICANS SEE THE PARADE.

Chauncey M. Depew, George Gould, and Mark Twain in London.

LONDON, June 22.—Chauncey M. Depew witnessed the procession as the guest of the Baroness Burdett Coutts, George Gould, Mrs. Gould, and the members of their family, from the Savoy Hotel, while Mark Twain, Mr. M.H. De Young, and Mrs. De Young, with Mrs. and Miss Deane of San Francisco, looked on from the Hotel Cecil.

This evening her Majesty gave a family dinner party in the state supper room of Buckingham Palace at a quarter to nine. All the members of the royal family were present, as well as all the royal guests. Their suites dined in the garden vestibule [NY Times, p.2, June 23, 1897].

SLC used mourning border for most letters from Susy’s death on, then from Livy’s death on.