“‘That’s easy, you are arrested for a breach of the city regulations. You allowed your servants to put the bedclothes near the window, and when I stand on tiptoes on the other side of the street, I can see them.’
“I laughed again. He repeated that I was under arrest, and ordered me to come to court the next morning at nine.
“So next morning at nine I went to court, the legation having furnished me with a lawyer. When the judge came in, I rose like everybody else to salute His Honor, then settled down to watch proceedings, and without wishing to be offensive, of course, I slung one knee over the other. Thereupon, the judge called me to the bar and fined me twenty marks for indecent behavior. In a German court I was expected to bend, not cross, my knees. Next my case was called and, as the court was possibly prejudiced on account of the knee incident, I was fined ten marks for showing perfectly clean linen, and twenty marks for laughing at a mister policeman. It cost me fifty marks ($12.50) all in all and I expected to make about five hundred dollars writing about my disgrace. However, Livy thought the telling of it would deal the family escutcheon a blow from which it could never hope to recover and so I had to stick to my five-cent stogies the same as the mister policeman.”
BOOKS THAT WEREN’T WRITTEN
As every friend of Mark Twain’s writings knows, Mark was never short on literary projects, and at the time of their conception all looked exceedingly good to him. As a rule he would start work on the new subject at once with enthusiasm unlimited, writing, dictating, rewriting, dictaphoning and what not! Small wonder that the waiters at the Hotel Metropole in Vienna called him a “dictator.” However, not infrequently his golden imaginings proved idle dross, or else were put aside for new fancies. During his Berlin season he was very keen, at one time, on writing a book on the Three Charles’s, dealing with a terzetto of crowned rascals, but the project, like so many others, was abandoned or died. If I remember rightly, Clemens told me, either in Vienna or London, that he might have felt stronger on the Three Charles’s if it wasn’t for Thackeray’s Four Georges.
The Three Charles’s idea was born of this slight incident:
We had met at the famous Cafe Bauer, Herr Bamberger, some time private secretary to Charles of Brunswick, better known as the Diamond Duke. Bamberger told us some racy stories about the late Highness who had left a million to a Swiss town on condition that it set up a monument to his memory. The monument was built, but so faultily that after six months or so it tumbled down. And the débris having been carted away, Charles’ dream of glory came to an abrupt end.
Mark and Bamberger had several more interviews and one morning, at the Legation, Clemens announced that his next book would be “The Three Charles’s,” Charles the First and the Second of England and Charles of Brunswick, who was also partly English.
“In all his long life,” said Mark, “the Brunswick Charles did only one decent thing and that was a lie. ‘Here reposes the murdered Queen of England,’ he had chiselled upon the entrance to the mausoleum harboring the remains of Queen Charlotte, wife of George. Now this fellow George knew more about buttons for a waistcoat, or sauce for a partridge, than about kingship, he fought—but certainly did not murder his wife. On the other hand, Bamberger tells me, that the Brunswick Charles poisoned a number of people while playing at kingship. Yet all the punishment he got at the hands of his loving subjects was the dirty kick-out. They burned his palace, besides, but later had to rebuild it at their own cost. In short, get the true picture of Charles and loathe royalty ever afterwards,” recommended Mark.
“You can’t conceive of the meanness of this German kinglet,” said Mark at another time. “Once he had trouble with a courtier, Baron Cramner. The Baron fled to escape a dose of aqua toffana, but his wife, who expected her first baby, had to remain in Brunswick. What does Charles do? He forbids all physicians, surgeons and midwives, on pain of imprisonment and loss of license, to attend her Ladyship. And he set spies about her house to be informed of the time of travail. And when she was in agony, he had a huge mass of powder, said Bamberger, five thousand pounds, exploded in the neighborhood of her residence. There are a hundred more stories like that. After he fled from Brunswick, the Duke’s medicine chest was found to be crammed full of poison bottles and powders, the label of each container showing how often employed and how long it took for the poison to work.