Have just got Livy L. Clemens & Miss Spaulding off to the Opera in charge of an old friend—(for I cannot stand anything that is in the nature of an Opera)—& here I find a letter from Susie Warner to Mrs. Clemens—I open it & my goodness, how she raves over the exquisiteness of Belmont; & the wonderful view; & Mrs. Howells’s brilliancy, & her deadly accuracy in the matter of detecting & driving the bulls-eye of a sham; & the attractiveness of the children; & your own “sweetness” (why, do they call you that?—that is what they generally call me); & the indescribably good time which she & Charley had; & my old pipe dressed up in ribbons & holding a candle, & making an unique & graceful ornament of itself—& I thank you for paying these kindly honors to the old pipe,—if the dull plebeian thing half appreciated them it would have turned to gold-mounted malachite by this time.

So the reading of that letter has set me going, when it was my purpose to turn in, immediately, & read & smoke. However, I’ll cut myself short, for once. Mr. Mead called yesterday (not Larkin G.,) just as I was starting off to the neighborhood of the Triumphal Arch on business, so he walked with me to the rue de Rivoli & up the Champs Elysée half way to the Arch—which gave us a chance to talk a good deal about you & your disappointment in the matter of the Pacific excursion, (what a real pity that was,)& other matters. He is going to call again, & come in the evening, when we are business-free.

Well, I had a very curious experience, Sunday, day before yesterday. Since I was

〚Pages 5, 6, 7 and 8 torn up.〛

It was splendid in the President to appoint Mr. White. The more I think of the matter the more I am satisfied that the President never appointed Bret Harte. Evarts simply crowded that shameless scoundrel in. You have seen by the papers that Harte has deliberately swindled two German publishing houses, by selling each the sole right to print one of his books. Poor Boyesen is here in this expensive city, & has got to stay here till his wife is confined in July, & every cent of silver is worth its weight in gold to him; well, two German publishers were going to buy some of his literature, but all of a sudden comes a letter from a famous German author a week or so ago, freighted with disappointment—the publishers have reconsidered the matter, & say in plain terms that they must decline to buy anything of an American author, now, unless he will give bond not to to indemnify them in case he has sold the sole right to some other German publisher! It comes hard on Boyesen. We like Boyesen & his wife, heartily. Poor fellow, there are 12 Orions in his family. That’s enough to make anybody warm to him.

Do you know, I wanted to take that German author’s lietter & send it to the President & say “Y When your Excellency found that George Butler was drunk, on his way to his new post, you dismissed him before he got there; here is a new appointee who is also a drunkard, & is a thief besides: is it not a case for dismissal?” But I couldn’t seem to word a formal state paper just right in my mind, & I wouldn’t send one that wasn’t in every way a proper thing for the head of our country to read—so I’ve dropped it for the present. I told Bret Harte, just before the Presidential election, that the New York Custom house was the right place for him, & that I thought him an unfit person for our foreign service. I would thingk so yet, only the Custom house has latterly become too clean a place for such a dirty bird as he is.

cross-written over the above paragraph:

Good night, my boy—

new page:

Chatto sent me Harte’s new book of Sketches, the other day, (“An Heiress of Red Dog,” etc). I have read it twice—the first time through tears of rage over the fellow’s inborn hypocrisy & snobbishness, & his apprentice-art, his artificialities, his mannerisms, his pet phrases, (such as “ the frequent “I regret to say,”)—& his laboriously acquired ignorance, & his jejune anxiety to display it. O, my God! He rings in Strasse when street would answer every purpose, and Bahnhof when it carries no sharper significance to the reader than depot than “station” would; & he peppers in his seven little French words (you can find them in all his sketches, for he learned them in California 14 years ago,),—he begins his German substantives with “lower case” generally, & sometimes mis-spells them—all this with a dictionary at his very elbow—what an illustration of his slovenly laziness it is! And Jack Hamlin talks like a Bowery gutter-snipe on one page, & like a courtier of Louis XV’s time on the very next one. And he has a “nigger” who talks a “dialect” which is utterly original. The struggle after the pathetic is more pathetic than the pathos itself; if he were to write about an Orphan Princess who lost a Peanut he would feel obliged to try to make somebody snuffle over it.

The second time I read the book I saw a most decided brightness on every page of it—& here & there the evidences of genius. I saw enough to make me think, “Well, if this slovenly shoemaker-work is able to command the applause of three or four nations, what mightn’t this ass accomplish if he would do his work honestly & with pains?” If I ever get my tedious book finished, I mean to weed out some of my prejudices & write an article on “Bret Harte as an Artist”—& print it if it would will not be unfair to print it without signature.

Tauchnitz called the other day—I a mighty nice old gentleman. He paid me 425 francs for the Innocents—I think he paid me about skeleton n. 6 or 700 f. for Tom Sawyer (it being new); he is going to print Roughing It by & by, & has engaged advanced sheets of my new book. Don’t know what he will pay forthe two latter—I leave that to him—one can’t have the heart to dicker with a publisher who won’t steal.

Can’t you get up a plot for a “skeleton novelette” & find two or three fellows to join us in writing the stories? Five of us would do. I can’t seem to give up that idea.

I knew the President would veto that infamous Chinese bill. I wish I knew whether Belmont was a P. O. or a country seat.