Chapter XIX. Venice and the Venisons
Getting back again to guides, I am reminded that our acquaintanceship with the second member of the Mark Twain brotherhood was staged in Paris. This gentleman wished himself on us one afternoon at the Hotel des Invalides. We did not engage him; he engaged us, doing the trick with such finesse and skill that before we realized it we had been retained to accompany him to various points of interest in and round Paris. However, we remained under his control one day only. At nightfall we wrested ourselves free and fled under cover of darkness to German soil, where we were comparatively safe.
I never knew a man who advanced so rapidly in a military way as he did during the course of that one day. Our own national guard could not hold a candle to him. He started out at ten A.M. by being an officer of volunteers in the Franco-Prussian War; but every time he slipped away and took a nip out of his private bottle, which was often, he advanced in rank automatically. Before the dusk of evening came he was a corps commander, who had been ennobled on the field of battle by the hand of Napoleon the Third.
He took us to Versailles. We did not particularly care to go to Versailles that day, because it was raining; but he insisted and we went. In spite of the drizzle we might have enjoyed that wonderful place had he not been constantly at our elbows, gabbling away steadily except when he excused himself for a moment and stepped behind a tree, to emerge a moment later wiping his mouth on his sleeve. Then he would return to us, with an added gimpiness in his elderly legs, an increased expansion of the chest inside his tight and shiny frock coat, and a fresh freight of richness on his breath, to report another deserved promotion.
After he had eaten luncheon—all except such portions of it as he spilled on himself—the colonel grew confidential and chummy. He tried to tell me an off-color story and forgot the point of it, if indeed it had any point. He began humming the Marseillaise hymn, but broke off to say he expected to live to see the day when a column of French troops, singing that air, would march up Unter den Linden to stack their arms in the halls of the Kaiser's palace. I did not take issue with him. Every man is entitled to his own wishes in those matters. But later on, when I had seen something of the Kaiser's standing army, I thought to myself that when the French troops did march up Unter den Linden they would find it tolerably rough sledding, and if there was any singing done a good many of them probably would not be able to join in the last verse.
Immediately following this, our conductor confided to me that he had once had the honor of serving Mr. Clemens, whom he referred to as Mick Twine. He told me things about Mr. Clemens of which I had never heard. I do not think Mr. Clemens ever heard of them either. Then the brigadier—it was now after three o'clock, and between three and three-thirty he was a brigadier—drew my arm within his.
"I, too, am an author," he stated. "It is not generally known, but I have written much. I wrote a book of which you may have heard—'The Wandering Jew.'" And he tapped himself on the bosom proudly.
I said I had somehow contracted a notion that a party named Sue—Eugene Sue—had something to do with writing the work of that name.
"Ah, but you are right there, my friend," he said. "Sue wrote 'The Wandering Jew' the first time—as a novel, merely; but I wrote him much better—as a satire on the anti-Semitic movement."