“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 or it would do
the communist no good.”
A curious thing happened one day in Paris. Boyesen, in great excitement, came to the Normandy and was shown to the Clemens apartments. He was pale and could hardly speak, for his emotion. He asked immediately if his wife had come to their rooms. On learning that she had not, he declared that she was lost or had met with an accident. She had been gone several hours, he said, and had sent no word, a thing which she had never done before. He besought Clemens to aid him in his search for her, to do something to help him find her. Clemens, without showing the least emotion or special concentration of interest, said quietly:
“I will.”
“Where will you go first,” Boyesen demanded.
Still in the same even voice Clemens said:
“To the elevator.”
He passed out of the room, with Boyesen behind him, into the hall. The elevator was just coming up, and as they reached it, it stopped at their landing, and Mrs. Boyesen stepped out. She had been delayed by a breakdown and a blockade. Clemens said afterward that he had a positive conviction that she would be on the elevator when they reached it. It was one of those curious psychic evidences which we find all along during his life; or, if the skeptics prefer to call them coincidences, they are privileged to do so.
Paris, June 1, 1879. Still this vindictive winter continues. Had a
raw, cold rain to-day. To-night we sit around a rousing wood fire.