The Autobiography of Mark Twain - Mark Twain (best english books to read .TXT) 📗

House⁠—Describes the Paris house in which they lived in 1893⁠—also room in Villa Viviani⁠—also dining-room in house at Riverdale⁠—Tells how Mr. Clemens was “dusted off” after the various dinners⁠—and the card system of signals⁠—Letter from Mr. Gilder regarding Mr. Cleveland’s sixty-ninth birthday.⁠—Mason.

I was always heedless. I was born heedless, and therefore I was constantly, and quite unconsciously, committing breaches of the minor proprieties, which brought upon me humiliations which ought to have humiliated me, but didn’t, because I didn’t know anything had happened. But Livy knew; and so the humiliations fell to her share, poor child, who had not earned them and did not deserve them. She always said I was the most difficult child she had. She was very sensitive about me. It distressed her to see me do heedless things which could bring me under criticism, and so she was always watchful and alert to protect me from the kind of transgressions which I have been speaking of.

When I was leaving Hartford for Washington, upon the occasion referred to, she said: “I have written a small warning and put it in a pocket of your dress vest. When you are dressing to go to the Authors’ Reception at the White House you will naturally put your fingers in your vest pockets, according to your custom, and you will find that little note there. Read it carefully and do as it tells you. I cannot be with you, and so I delegate my sentry duties to this little note. If I should give you the warning by word of mouth, now, it would pass from your head and be forgotten in a few minutes.”

It was President Cleveland’s first term. I had never seen his wife⁠—the young, the beautiful, the good-hearted, the sympathetic, the fascinating. Sure enough, just as I had finished dressing to go to the White House I found that little note, which I had long ago forgotten. It was a grave little note, a serious little note, like its writer, but it made me laugh. Livy’s gentle gravities often produced that effect upon me, where the expert humorist’s best joke would have failed, for I do not laugh easily.

When we reached the White House and I was shaking hands with the President, he started to say something, but I interrupted him and said, “If Your Excellency will excuse me, I will come back in a moment; but now I have a very important matter to attend to, and it must be attended to at once.” I turned to Mrs. Cleveland, the young, the beautiful, the fascinating, and gave her my card, on which I had written “He did not”⁠—and I asked her to sign her name below those words.

She said: “He did not? He did not what?”

“Oh,” I said, “never mind. We cannot stop to discuss that now. This is urgent. Won’t you please sign your name?” (I handed her a fountain pen.)

“Why,” she said, “I cannot commit myself in that way. Who is it that didn’t?⁠—and what is it that he didn’t?”

“Oh,” I said, “time is flying, flying, flying! Won’t you take me out of my distress and sign your name to it? It’s all right. I give you my word it’s all right.”

She looked nonplussed, but hesitatingly and mechanically she took the pen and said: “I will sign it. I will take the risk. But you must tell me all about it, right afterward, so that you can be arrested before you get out of the house in case there should be anything criminal about this.”

Then she signed; and I handed her Mrs. Clemens’s note, which was very brief, very simple, and to the point. It said, “Don’t wear your arctics in the White House.” It made her shout; and at my request she summoned a messenger and we sent that card at once to the mail on its way to Mrs. Clemens in Hartford.

During 1893 and ’94 we were living in Paris, the first half of the time at the Hotel Brighton, in the rue de Rivoli, the other half in a charming mansion in the rue de l’Université, on the other side of the Seine, which, by good luck, we had gotten hold of through another man’s ill luck. This was Pomeroy, the artist. Illness in his family had made it necessary for him to go to the Riviera. He was paying thirty-six hundred dollars a year for the house, but allowed us to have it at twenty-six hundred. It was a lovely house; large, rambling, quaint, charmingly furnished and decorated; built upon no particular plan; delightfully rambling, uncertain, and full of surprises. You were always getting lost in it, and finding nooks and corners and rooms which you didn’t know were there and whose presence you had not suspected before. It was built by a rich French artist; and he had also furnished it and decorated it himself. The studio was coziness itself. We used it as drawing-room, sitting-room, living-room, dancing-room⁠—we used it for everything. We couldn’t get enough of it. It is odd that it should have been so cozy, for it was forty feet long, forty feet high, and thirty feet wide, with a vast fireplace on each side in the middle, and a musicians’ gallery at one end. But we had, before this, found out that under the proper conditions spaciousness and coziness do go together most affectionately and congruously. We had found it out a year or two earlier, when we were living in the Villa Viviani three miles outside the walls of Florence. That house had a room in it which was forty feet square and forty feet high, and at first we couldn’t endure it. We called it the Mammoth Cave; we called it the skating-rink; we called it the Great Sahara; we called it all sorts of names intended to convey our disrespect. We had to pass through it to get from one end of the house to the other, but we passed straight through and did not loiter⁠—and yet before