To Mrs. Clemens, in Paris:
Feb.—.
Livy dear, last night I played billiards with Mr. Rogers until 11, then went to Robert Reid's studio and had a most delightful time until 4 this morning. No ladies were invited this time. Among the people present were—
Coquelin;
Richard Harding Davis;
Harrison, the great out-door painter;
Wm. H. Chase, the artist;
Bettini, inventor of the new phonograph.
Nikola Tesla, the world-wide illustrious electrician; see article about
him in Jan. or Feb. Century.
John Drew, actor;
James Barnes, a marvelous mimic; my, you should see him!
Smedley the artist;
Zorn the artist;
Zogbaum the artist;
Reinhart the artist;
Metcalf the artist;
Ancona, head tenor at the Opera;
Oh, a great lot of others. Everybody there had done something and was in his way famous.
Somebody welcomed Coquelin in a nice little French speech; John Drew did the like for me in English, and then the fun began. Coquelin did some excellent French monologues—one of them an ungrammatical Englishman telling a colorless historiette in French. It nearly killed the fifteen or twenty people who understood it.
I told a yarn, Ancona sang half a dozen songs, Barnes did his darling imitations, Harding Davis sang the hanging of Danny Deever, which was of course good, but he followed it with that most fascinating (for what reason I don't know) of all Kipling's poems, “On the Road to Mandalay,” sang it tenderly, and it searched me deeper and charmed me more than the Deever.
Young Gerrit Smith played some ravishing dance music and we all danced about an hour. There couldn't be a pleasanter night than that one was. Some of those people complained of fatigue but I don't seem to know what the sense of fatigue is.
Coquelin talks quite good English now. He said: