22 September 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00509)
My map is attracting a deal of attention.1explanatory note We get letters requesting copies from everywhere. Now what you need is something to make the postmasters & the public preserve your posters about “Innocents” & stick them up & if you would put that map & accompanying testimonials2explanatory note right in the centre of the poster & the Ⓐemendation thing is accomplished, sure.
If you want to do this, write or telegraph me at once, & I will have a stereotype made & send to you.3explanatory note
letter docketed: ✓ and Mark Twain | Sept 22/70
In the Buffalo Express of Saturday, 17 September, Clemens published his burlesque war map, “Fortifications of Paris” (see 10? Oct 70 to Spoffordclick to open link for a facsimile). It parodied newspaper maps of the Franco-Prussian War (19 July 1870–21 May 1871), probably including the New York World’s “The Fortifications of Paris” (11 Aug 70, 1; 10 Sept 70, 1) and the New York Tribune’s “The Defences and Environs of Paris” (13 Sept 70, 1). On 19 September the Express published the following notice:
To Be Continued.—As we have been unable to supply the demand for Saturday’s issue of the Express, we hereby give notice that the “Map of the Fortifications of Paris,” will be published in the Weekly Express which will be issued Wednesday morning. (“City and Vicinity,” 4)
Publication of the weekly on Wednesday (21 September), rather than on Thursday as customary, was perhaps intended to meet the feverish demand for the map, which was a broadside supplement to the paper ( BAL , 3320). Clemens also reprinted it, as “Mark Twain’s Map of Paris,” in the Galaxy for November, explaining there that he did so “to satisfy the extraordinary demand for it which has arisen in military circles throughout the country” (SLC 1870, 724). In February 1871, Donn Piatt, Washington correspondent of the Cincinnati Commercial, reported a conversation in which Clemens described the circumstances of the map’s creation:
“Only think,” said he, “I knew that confounded thing had to be done, and, with a dear friend lying dead before me, and my wife half distracted over the loss, I had to get off my articles so as not to disappoint my publishers, and when I sat down with a board and penknife, to engrave that map of Paris, I did so with a heavy heart, and in a house of lamentation.” (Piatt 1871)
The dear friend was surely Emma Nye, not Jervis Langdon, as has been suggested (Steinbrink, 205–6 n. 8). Langdon died on 6 August in Elmira. Nye “lingered a month” in Buffalo, mortally ill, and finally expired on 29 September, twelve days after the map was first published (13 Oct 70 to Fairbanksclick to open link). Nevertheless, Clemens persisted in believing that he created the map after, or very shortly before, Nye died. In his notebook for 1900, he specifically linked the map with her death:
Map of Paris. Emma Nye lying dead.
Reversing the map was not intentional—it was heedlessness. (Notebook 43, TS page 3, CU-MARK)
And in 1906, he connected the map with the “last two or three days” of her illness:
Those two or three days are among the blackest, the gloomiest, the most wretched of my long life.
The resulting periodical and sudden changes of mood in me, from deep melancholy to half insane tempests and cyclones of humor, are among the curiosities of my life. During one of those spasms of humorous possession I sent down to my newspaper office for a huge wooden capital M and turned it upside-down and carved a crude and absurd map of Paris upon it, and published it, along with a sufficiently absurd description of it, with guarded and imaginary compliments of it bearing the signatures of General Grant and other experts. (AD, 15 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE , 251)
After Clemens’s own death in 1910, Josephus N. Larned recalled that Clemens also worked on the map at the Express offices:
I doubt if he ever enjoyed anything more than the jackknife engraving that he did on a piece of board for a military Map of the Siege of Paris, which was printed in The Express from his original “plate,” with accompanying explanations and comments. His half day of whittling and the laughter that went with it are something that I find pleasant to remember. (Larned 1910)
Bogus “Official Commendations” from: Ulysses S. Grant; Prussian Premier Otto von Bismarck; Brigham Young; French Emperor Napoleon III; J. Smith, otherwise unidentified; Achille François Bazaine, supreme commander of French forces; Louis Jules Trochu, the military governor of Paris; Lieutenant-General William T. Sherman; and William I, king of Prussia (called William III by Clemens).
Bliss may have incorporated the “Fortifications of Paris” into an advertising poster for The Innocents Abroad (see 29 Oct 70 to Blissclick to open link), but no examples of it are known to survive.
Although the letter was written on a folder with the monogram llc , Clemens made some effort to avoid emphasizing it by turning over the folder and beginning his letter on page 4.
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L4 , 198–200; MTLP , 39–40.
see Mendoza Collection in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.