notation and letterhead circled:

Address until
 June 1, 1879,

the normandy hotel

and maybe, July 1.

7, rue de l’échelle

Drexel, Harjes & Co

& 256, rue saint-honoré

Bankers, paris

——

O, dear, dear, dear! I am the boss scoundrel of modern times, in the matter of undutifulness to parents. But, my dear mother, a body ought to have a moral lapse of some kind to keep from being perfection, & I suppose the ignoring of the 5th commandment is the blemish is the one that saves me from moral perfection. Two or three weeks ago, in Munich, my conscience woke out of a year-long torpor & got to torturing me so that I put down my more higher duties & said, “I will not sleep or eat until I have written to every mother I have got in the world.” And I did write to my Fredonia mother, & began a letter to my Elmira mother, & got the steam going for a an intended letter to you. That was as far as I got, but it gave my conscience a wonderful relief. Since then, how often I have thought of my goodness of that day—& how often I have intended to repeat it the first time my conscience should begin to hurt again. Well, your letter has wakened it up, & so I mean to write you, & begin a letter to Elmira, & finish by intending one to Fredonia. Then I shall be perfectly happy for another month. I mightily like to get letters from you, & I mightily like to answer them, too, after I get started, but I do so hate to start! Why ain’t people constructed so that they will like to write letters? I don’t mind taking a bath, after I am once in, but I do hate to get in.

O dear, the troubles! I was hoping that Mr. Fairbanks’ g brave fight had won the field, long ago, & that he was enjoying well earned peace and victory—& now it seems that the battle is still not over. But you & he seem to be making the best of the rough episode, & I do hope you will have good news to send us next time.

I’ve been having a dismal time for months over this confounded book, working hard every time I got a chance, & tearing up a lot of the MS next time I came to read it over. However, I think I am half done the bookⒶemendation at last, & I suppose I shall finish it in Paris, for I expect to work six days in the week here, uninterruptedly for the next 2 or 2½ months. (I am making part of the illustrations for it myself.) It is to be as big as the Innocents Abroad (by the way, Tauchnitz bought of me the right to put the Innocents Abroad in his series, day before yesterday—he had previously published & To paid for Tom Sawyer in his square honorable way.) By George I had a rattling set-back in Munich about 2 or 3 weeks ago. When I struck page 900 I wrote home jubilantly, that my book was just half done—& I treated myself to several hours’ genuine happiness, too; & then I counted up & found that I had written only 65 to 70 words on a page, instead of 100! Consequently I was only ⅓ done. I had been writing 30 pages a day, & S allowing myself Saturdays for holiday. However, I had 8 clear days left before leaving Munich—so I buckled in & wrote 400 pages in those 8 days & so brought my work close up to half-way. My study, a mile from this hotel, will be ready for me a week hence, & then I shall go at it again. I always come home from work so tired I can hardly hold my head up, & that’s one reason why I don’t write letters. Latterly During that final 8-day spurt in Munich I allowed myself only the Sunday for holiday—& I utilized that Sunday by writing 60 pages of letters. W

I wish Charlie could appear as one of the illustrators of my book; but he would be in New York & the MS could not be sent there. private Ⓐemendation The illustrating will be done by some exceedingly cheap artists, I suppose, PRIVATEⒶemendation who will roost in Hartford where they can have access to the MS. But there is that article you speak of—“The Recent French Duel”—why shouldn’t Charley illustrate that, in competition with Bliss’s artist, & send the pictures to E. Bliss, Jr., 28 American Pub. Co., 284 Asylum st., Hartford? I think Bliss would have wit enough to use Charlie’s pictures if they were better than the other artist’s. I shall use that chapter in the book—it will follow a perfectly serious description of 5 very bloody student-duels which I witnessed in Heidelberg one day—a description which simply describes the terrific spectacle, & with no jests interlarded & no comments added. The contrast between that chapter & the next one (the Great Gambetta duel) will be the silent but eloquent comment. The Americans in Paris have all read my “Duel Recent French Duel & are loud in their praises of it. That is mighty pleasant. I perceive that some of my points were more pointed than I had supposed they were.

By geeminy I wish you would write me up in the way you speak of. It is exactly the article I have long wished that some competent hand would write, but no competent hand has ever proposed it before. There isn’t any hand so competent as yours, nor any other that could take the right interest & pleasure in the work. Se How they have always botched that pretty incident of the arrival in Buffalo that night, at what I th supposed was the “boarding house” which Mr. Slee had engaged for us—the literary shoemakers! Now you write that article & take some of the deformities out of my shape & let me stand up straight in print once.

We’re expecting Frank D. Millet, a very dear young artist friend of ours here, every moment, to dinner, with the lovely girl he is to marry next Tuesday—with I & 3 friends as witnesses,—& Livy & Clara S. & I & 6 or 8 more will eat the wedding breakfast in his studio. Millet’s a mighty talented fellow. He was chief correspondent of the N. Y. Herald, & afterwards of the London Daily News, in the late Turco-Russian war, & he won 4 decorations—one of them was sent him by the Emperor of Russia for intrepidity in on the field of battle. I have seen these decorations, but Millet himself does not speak of them, for he is an exceedingly modest fellow.

O dear, dear, dear! There’s my conscience again, & my dear little sister Mollie! Often’s the time I’ve written Mollie, in my mind, but mighty little credit a body gets for that—at least in this world; but there is another world, thank goodness, & there I shall have praise for writing Mollie tons of letters which she never received. And the angels will admire & say, “What a faithful & bully correspondent he was;—& yet how little credit he got for it there below.” Well, I love Mollie just the same, & I am going to write her again, too. You give her my love, will you?

The children are well, & as good as they can be, except that Bay will lie,—which is rather a grace than a defect—& besides it makes her conspicuous in a family like this. They speak German glibly—the rest of us can’t. You won’t c ever catch me fooling around any more foreign languages—particularly as I don’t intend to wander off to any more foreign lands till after I’m dead. Livy’s health is very good, & wood is very high—3 francs a bank basket—plain, ungilded firewood—five dollars a day is what it costs us—& when I first saw the bill here it was I thought it was for carved furniture, but no, sir, it was for firewood, & glad I am we didn’t arrive here when it was cold weather. Livy sends a world of love to you & all sorts of affectionate remembrances & to think that the basket only holds 6 sticks, too, & at 3 francs the basket that makes it ½ a franc the stick, & no ornamentation at all on it but just plain ordinary wood such as we get from Charley Warner’s wood-pile nights at home for absolutely nothing; & she wishes you were here, so she could show you how much French & German she & Clara have still to learn, & I’ll be hanged if I don’t honestly believe that if we had been here in the January cold snap we should have had to turn our entire income into wood & then eat the ashes, for at 3 francs a basket you see yourself how it would mount up, & how soon a person would bust or freeze if he did not turn the thermometer the other way—& so I am as ever your loving son