Vol 3 Section 0176
princess comes raging in here & wanting to know.” But Livy could not hear fun—it was not a time to be trying to be funny—we were in a most miserable & shameful situation, & if—
Just then the door spread wide & our princess & 4 more, & 3 little princes flowed in! Our princess, & her sister the Archduchess Marie Therese … & by & by it turned out that we were the right ones, & had been sent for by a messenger who started too late to catch us at the hotel. We were invited for 2 o’clock, but we beat that arrangement by an hour & a half.
Wasn’t that a rattling good comedy situation? Seems a kind of pity we were the right ones. It would have been such nuts to see the right ones come, & get fired out, & we chatting along comfortably & nobody suspecting us for impostors [MTP].
Sam’s notebook (NB 40 TS 8-11) also provides a somewhat longer account of the above “adventure”; Dolmetsch quotes from it to detail additional personages the Clemenses met on Feb. 1 (141). See Feb. 1.
Sam put this date on a short piece with anecdote, that Paine later titled “Beauties of the German Language.” The piece begins: “Lectured for the benefit of a charity last night, in the Bösendorfersaal.” The lecture was on Feb. 1, however, not Feb. 2, so it is assumed the date was affixed after some revision was made [AMT 1: 118-19]. Note: this piece was included in MTA 1: 118-19.
On Feb. 1 Siegmund Schlesinger had made an appointment to confer with Sam this day. See letter.
February 4 Friday – At the Hotel Metropole in Vienna, Austria, Sam replied to Frank Marshall White (whose letter is not extant).
“It wouldn’t do to print the Comedy, because it would destroy the stage-right in England & could damage it in America.
“That would be rather sorrowful, after all the work I have put on it.”
Sam added he was still shortening one end of the play and adding to the other, but having trouble with the technique [MTP]. Note: the unspecified play likely was one of the two comedies he was collaborating with Siegmund Schlesinger on, likely Der Gegenkandidat, oder die Frauen Politiker (Woman in Politics). See also Jan. 20, and Feb. 5. .
Sam’s notebook entry for Feb. 4 includes a notation of his and Livy’s “betrothal day,” and a short account of meeting royalty at the Feb. 1 charity lecture, and the Feb. 3 “rattling good comedy situation” of calling at the Archducal palace [NB 40 TS 8-11].
February 5 Saturday – At the Hotel Metropole in Vienna, Austria, Sam began a letter to H.H. Rogers that he finished on Feb. 6.
Yours of Jan. 21 [not extant] was just full of charm. It will be a nobby thing if you do get that letter out of the Mount Morris. I am afraid to think about it, & almost to write about it, I am so superstitious. But if you should land those fellows! (I’ll shut up & wait.).
He related a letter rec’d from Frank Bliss several weeks before with a total of 20,000 books sold by the end of 1897; he hadn’t answered not knowing what to say, because it was about a third of what he’d supposed would sell. Sam wanted Bliss to stay away from any deluxe edition and would “have his scalp if he tries.” When he’d rec’d the Bliss letter he was “well along with” what he knew would be “a rattling good subscription book” and had the American Publishing Co. in mind for it. The letter caused him to suddenly put the MS away and he hadn’t touched it since (No single Mark Twain book after FE sold by subscription, though sets were). He related working on the “Woman in Politics” comedy with “an
SLC used mourning border for most letters from Susy’s death on, then from Livy’s death on.