FOOTNOTES:
[B] Miss Lucy Cleveland, the author, heard Mr. Clemens tell the same story at a dinner party in New York.
RHEUMATISM AND PRODDING
Some of the biographers of Mark Twain have made a lot of his sufferings by rheumatism while in Berlin. I saw him almost daily, except when he was down with bronchitis, and I heard very few complaints from him re rheumatism. Occasionally he said, “My damned arm has done some howling in the night.” But when out of bed, it never “howled” badly enough to prevent him from writing or holding a book. He was scribbling most of the time, when not talking or riding, or walking, and when I saw him in his “Mattress Mausoleum” (as he called his bed), he handled pipe, papers, knife and books freely. I honestly believe much of that rheumatism scare was put on. For Mark liked leisure above all things. When he did not feel like writing, he told Livy he “had it bad,” and escaped a scolding. “Livy” was an excellent wife to him, but she had the commercial spirit that Mark lacked—and God knows he needed prodding once in a while.
ON LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS
Mark Twain always liked to talk about “La Mouche, Heine’s girl-friend-to-the-death.” One morning, at the British Museum, he made me hunt through dozens of books, French, German and Italian, for her real name: Camille Seldon.
“So she wasn’t German,” he said. “I thought so, for a German girl, by her innate heaviness, might have spoiled that nimbleness of language we admire in Heine. Goethe’s girls, as their portraits show, were all beefy things—no, not all, I except Gretchen—hence Goethe’s Olympian periods, his ponderous style. It’s wrong, I think, to credit Camille with mere physical influence on Heine. Her limpid French conversation, I take it, aided in imparting to his French verse that airy, fairy lightness which a foreigner rarely commands.”
Some one reminded Clemens that Camille also had been the friend of Taine.
“A lucky girl! The most poesy-saturated of poets and the Father of English literature! I call him the Father,” he added, “because he made so many people read serious books which without his advice and encouragement they would never have tackled.”