Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes

by Clifton Fadiman

  2 Morse was a successful artist as well as inventor. He once painted a picture of a man in his death agony and showed it to a friend, who happened to be a doctor. “Well, what’s your opinion?” he demanded, after the doctor had studied the painting. “Malaria,” said the medical man without hesitation.

  MOSCARDÓ, José (1876–1956), Spanish soldier.

  1 As the defenders of the Alcázar were reduced to near-starvation rations, an officer notorious for grumbling came to see Moscardó to demand that he receive more than the usual daily allowance of food. Moscardó heard his demand through, then pulled out a 50-peseta bill and handed it to him. “Take this,” he said, “and go outside and buy something if you like. It’s the best I can do for you.”

  MOTT, Lucretia Coffin (1793–1880), US Quaker reformer who campaigned for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery.

  1 A meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society in New York was broken up by thugs, who attacked some of the speakers as they left the hall. Lucretia Mott told the gentleman accompanying her to escort some of the other ladies who were alone and frightened in the tumult. “But who will look after you?” he asked. “This gentleman,” she said, turning to one of the roughest-looking members of the mob and laying her hand on his arm. “He will see me safely through.” The thug was so astonished that he did as she requested and escorted her respectfully through the crowd to safety.

  MOUNTBATTEN of Burma, Louis, 1st Earl (1900–79), British naval commander, great-grandson of Queen Victoria.

  1 During the most controversial period of the Vietnam War, Mountbatten, in Los Angeles, was Johnny Carson’s guest on the Tonight show. He had previously warned Carson that he would answer no questions about Vietnam. On the show, after a few minutes of conversation that went quite smoothly, Carson apparently decided to slip one over on Mountbatten. “Sir,” he asked, “if you were President of the United States, what would you do about Vietnam?” Replied Mountbatten, “I’d tell the British to keep their noses out of it.”

  MOZART, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756–91), Austrian composer.

  1 At the age of two Mozart was taken to visit a farm, where he heard a pig squeal. “G-sharp!” he exclaimed. Someone ran to the piano. G-sharp was right.

  2 On his 1762 visit to Schönbrunn, the Austrian royal palace, Mozart slipped on the polished floor while romping with the young princesses and burst into tears. He was picked up and comforted by the seven-year-old Marie Antoinette. The little boy kissed the future queen of France and told her, “You are good. I will marry you.”

  3 Mozart was approached by a young man, little older than a boy, who sought his advice on composing a symphony. Mozart pointed out that he was still very young and it might be better if he began by composing ballads. “But you wrote symphonies when you were only ten years old,” objected the lad. “But I didn’t have to ask how,” Mozart retorted.

  4 At an evening party, Mozart bet Haydn a case of champagne that the older man could not play at sight a piece he had composed that afternoon. Haydn accepted the bet, the piece was placed on the spinet rack, Haydn briskly played the first few bars, then stopped short. He found it impossible to continue, for the composition prescribed playing with the two hands at the two ends of the keyboard and striking a note in the very center. Haydn confessed himself beaten. Mozart took his place at the piano and, reaching the fatal note, bent forward and hit it with his nose.

  5 The Emperor Franz Joseph II commissioned the creation of The Abduction from the Seraglio, but when he first heard it, he complained to Mozart, “That is too fine for my ears — there are too many notes.” Mozart replied, “There are just as many notes as there should be.”

  6 During the final rehearsal for the premiere of Don Giovanni, Mozart was unhappy with one of the singers, a young girl whose purity of voice had little power. In one scene she had to scream, but the singer was quite unconvincing. Mozart climbed up onstage, and in the gloom of the few candles that lit the scene crept up behind her without being seen. At the crucial moment, as she was about to scream, he pinched her arm violently, eliciting a bloodcurdling yell. “Admirable!” he exclaimed. “Mind you scream like that tonight!”

  7 When traveling through beautiful countryside, Mozart would often start humming, then singing, while looking around delightedly. “If only I could put the subject down on paper!” he would exclaim.

  8 After his death a fellow composer noted, “It is a pity to lose such a great genius, but a good thing for us that he is dead. For if he had lived much longer, we should not have earned a crust of bread by our compositions.”

  MUGGERIDGE, Malcolm (1903–90), British writer, broadcaster, and journalist.

  1 Muggeridge had little time for politicians and admitted that he had voted only once in his life. “On that occasion,” he said, “I just had to. There was this one candidate who had been committed to an asylum and upon discharge was issued a Certificate of Sanity. Well, now, how could I resist? What other politician anywhere has an actual medical report that he is sane? I simply had to support him!”

  MUGNIER, Abbé Arthur (1853–1944), French divine.

  1 A rather plump and also rather vain actress confessed to Mugnier that she sometimes admired her naked body in the mirror. “Is it a sin?” she asked. The abbé, glancing at her ample figure, replied, “No, madame, it’s an error.”

  2 At a social gathering, Mugnier, sitting beside an exceptionally attractive young lady, was asked by a gentleman present if he would dare to kiss her. “Certainly not!” replied the abbé. “She’s not yet a relic!”

  MUHAMMAD SHAH I (fl. 14th century), sultan of the Bahmani kingdom in southern India (1358–75).

  1 A ragged messenger arrived one day at the sultan’s capital, bearing dreadful news. The Hindus had captured his native town; he was the sole survivor of the ensuing massacre. Muhammad Shah was so outraged at the report that he immediately sentenced the unfortunate messenger to death. “I could never bear in my presence,” he said, “a wretch who could survive the sight of the slaughter of so many brave companions.”

  MUIR, John (1838–1914), US naturalist, born in Scotland.

  1 Financial consideration played only a small part in the satisfaction John Muir derived from life. On one occasion he declared that he was richer than magnate E. H. Harriman: “I have all the money I want and he hasn’t.”

  MURAVIEV, Count Mikhail (?1796–1866), Russian statesman.

  1 Although his cousin Sergei Muraviev-Apos-tol was one of the leaders of the December uprising in 1825 and was subsequently hanged for his part in it, Count Mikhail Mu-raviev attained prominence in the councils of Czar Alexander II. When Russian mismanagement in Poland led to a revolt there in 1863, he was one of those entrusted with the task of pacifying the country. The savagery with which he did this caused adverse comment, which the count brushed off by saying, “I am one of the hanging Muravievs, not one of the ones who are hanged.”

  MURRAY, Sir George (1772–1846), British soldier.

  1 During the expedition against the French in Egypt in 1801, Murray and his troops found themselves in the vicinity of Alexandria without water. Having had a classical education, Murray recalled that Julius Caesar had suffered the same problem in almost exactly the same spot. He lost no time in consulting the copy of Caesar’s writings that he always carried with him, and was delighted to discover that the Romans had found water by digging wells in the sand to a specified depth. Murray set his men to work and before long a plentiful water supply was found.

  MURRAY, [George] Gilbert [Aimé] (1866–1957), British classical scholar.

  1 Gilbert Murray’s wife, Lady Mary Howard, was a teetotaler and a vegetarian. She converted her husband to her way of thinking, but when guests were present she allowed a joint of meat to be served. Murray, carving the joint, would ask the guests, “Will you have some of the corpse, or will you try the alternative?”

  2 (As a student coming belatedly to Oxford after active service in World War I, poet Robert Graves was discussing Aristo
tle’s Poetics with Gilbert Murray in the latter’s study. Murray was pacing up and down.)

  “I suddenly asked, ‘Exactly what is the principle of that walk of yours? Are you trying to avoid the flowers on the rug, or are you trying to keep to the squares?’ My own compulsion-neuroses made it easy for me to notice them in others. He wheeled around sharply: ‘You’re the first person who has caught me out,’ he said. ‘No, it’s not the flowers or the squares; it’s a habit that I have got into of doing things in sevens. I take seven steps, you see, then I change direction and go another seven steps, then I turn around. I consulted Browne, the Professor of Psychology, about it the other day, but he assured me it isn’t a dangerous habit. He said, “When you find yourself getting into multiples of seven, come to me again.” ’ ”

  MUSIAL, Stan (1920–), US baseball player.

  1 In the 1951 All-Star game, Yankees pitcher Ed Lopat told Brooklyn’s pitcher Preacher Roe that he had found a perfect way to pitch against Musial. In the fourth inning he had his chance — and Musial hit a home run. Roe stood in the stands and shouted at Lopat, “I see what you mean, but I found that way to pitch to him a long time ago, all by myself.”

  MUSSET, Alfred de (1810–57), French poet, novelist, and playwright.

  1 Alfred de Musset’s affairs caused considerable scandal. A Théâtre Français actress accosted the famous poet familiarly, but in her ignorance left out the particle in his name: “Monsieur Musset, they tell me you boast of having slept with me.” Musset replied, “Pardon me, but I have always boasted of the exact opposite.”

  MYTTON, John (1796–1834), British sportsman and eccentric.

  1 The impetuous Mytton once set fire to his nightshirt in order to get rid of the hiccups. He succeeded, but it should be mentioned that he happened to be inside the nightshirt at the time.

  N

  NABOKOV, Vladimir (1899–1977), US novelist, born in Russia.

  1 (One summer in the 1940s Nabokov and his family stayed with James Laughlin at Alta, Utah, where Nabokov took the opportunity of enlarging his collection of butterflies and moths.)

  “Nabokov’s fiction has never been praised for its compassion; he was single-minded if nothing else. One evening at dusk he returned from his day’s excursion saying that during hot pursuit over Bear Gulch he had heard someone groaning most piteously down by the stream. ‘Did you stop?’ Laughlin asked him. ‘No, I had to get the butterfly.’ The next day the corpse of an aged prospector was discovered in what has been renamed, in Nabokov’s honor, Dead Man’s Gulch.”

  2 After the publication of Lolita Nabokov (who characterized himself, probably quite accurately, as a “mild old gentleman”) was on occasion besieged by aspiring nymphets. In his latter years he retired from teaching and took up residence in Montreux at the Palace Hotel.

  Interviewed by Alan Levy (New York Times Magazine, October 31, 1971), the great stylist described a post-Lolita experience that turned on a delicate question of rhetoric:

  “Not long ago there was someone with an American name who kept leaving vague messages for me all over Montreux. I started leaving messages too, that I was unavailable. Then I got one more message — a slip of paper that said, ‘F —— you.’ Well, this was so much more explicit than the others that I asked the desk what kind of person had left this message, and the desk said, ‘That wasn’t a person, sir; that was two rather wild-looking American girls.’ This intrigued me even more, so I looked at the paper again. And there I found something at the end of the message which I hadn’t noticed on my first reading: a question mark!”

  3 (Nabokov describes a visit to the distinguished French novelist Alain Robbe- Grillet.)

  “Robbe-Grillet’s petite pretty wife, a young actress, had dressed herself à la gamine in my honor, pretending to be Lolita, and she continued the performance the next day, when we met again at a publisher’s luncheon in a restaurant. After pouring wine for everyone but her, the waiter asked, ‘Voulez-vous un Coca-Cola, Mademoiselle?’ ”

  4 Nobokov loved puns, of course, and was given a golden opportunity when one of his students complained to him that a young couple in class was always spooning. Replied Nabokov, “Be grateful they were not forking.”

  NAGURSKI, Bronko (1908–90), Canadian-born US football player and wrestler.

  1 Carrying the ball, Nagurski ran right over people. In one game against the New York Giants, Benny Friedman hit him on the twelve-yard line but did not bring him down until the one-yard line. “He hits hard enough to knock down a horse,” muttered Friedman. On the next play, Nagurski did just that: he crashed through the end zone so hard, head down, that he ran into a mounted policeman and bowled over man and beast. Not quite sure what had happened, Nagurski stood up groggily, complaining, “That last man hit me awful hard.”

  2 Bruised and battered, the Pittsburgh Steelers were on their way home from a meeting with the Bears and Nagurski, when their train came to a jolting halt, spilling players into the aisles. “Run for your lives, men,” counseled a Steeler. “Nagurski has struck again.”

  3 As a result of some horseplay with a teammate, Nagurski once fell out of a second-floor window. A crowd gathered. A policeman appeared. He asked, “What happened?” Replied Nagurski, “I don’t know. I just got here myself.”

  NAMATH, Joe (1943–), US football player.

  1 (Frank Howard, a former Clemson football coach, told the following story about Na-math and Bear Bryan, the winningest college football coach of his period:)

  “Bear had a squad meeting one time and he told his players, ‘This is a class operation. I want your shoes to be shined. I want you to have a tie on, get your hair cut and keep a crease in your pants. I also want you to go to class. I don’t want no dumbbells on this team. If there is a dumbbell in the room, I wish he would stand up.’

  “Joe Namath rose to his feet, and Bear said, ‘Joe, how come you’re standing up? You ain’t dumb.’ Namath told him, ‘Coach, I just hate like the devil for you to be standing up there by yourself.’ ”

  NAPIER, Sir Charles James (1782–1853), British soldier and administrator.

  1 In August 1842 Napier annexed the province of Sind, thus giving the British control of the Indus River in what is now southeast Pakistan. Of this action Napier wrote in his journal: “We have no right to seize Sind, but we shall do so, and a very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality it will be.” He is reputed to have dispatched news of the conquest of Sind in one Latin word: “Pec-cavi” (I have sinned).

  NAPOLEON I (1769–1821), soldier and emperor of France (1804–15).

  1 (Napoleon always hated being on the losing side: when he played chess he would surreptitiously replace a forfeited piece on the board. His elder brother told a revealing story about Napoleon’s school days.)

  For an ancient history lesson the teacher brought in two huge flags, one the flag of Rome with the legend SPQR on it, and the other the flag of Carthage. With the flags set up on either side of the classroom, the children were divided into two groups to go and stand under them. Napoleon’s elder brother was sent to stand under the Roman flag, Napoleon under the Carthaginian flag. When Napoleon discovered that he was standing under the flag of the defeated, he protested until the teacher allowed him to change places with his brother.

  2 During Napoleon’s time as first consul it was the fashion for women to wear transparent gauze dresses. Somewhat incensed at this practice, one evening Napoleon ordered the servants to build up the drawing-room fire until the room reached ovenlike temperature. As he sourly explained: “It is extremely cold and these ladies are almost naked.” Joséphine understood the situation and inaugurated new fashions in dress of somewhat more seemly nature.

  3 As first consul, Napoleon often worked a six-teen-hour day. He expected that the Council of State would have stamina and zeal to match his own. One night when the councillors began to doze off, he reprimanded them, “Do let’s keep awake, citizens. It’s only two o’clock. We must earn our salaries.” These superhuman effo
rts were much applauded by Napoleon’s admirers, but not by royalists. One such admirer, singing the first consul’s praises, remarked, “God made Bonaparte and then rested.” An emigré count commented, “God should have rested a little earlier.”

  4 After an overnight journey Napoleon arrived at the palace of the king of Saxony and found himself in the middle of a full-scale reception. But Frederick Augustus discreetly led Napoleon into an anteroom where there was a chamber pot, saying, “I’ve often found that great men, like everybody else, sometimes require to be alone.”

  5 Receiving intelligence that seemed to link the Duc d’Enghien with royalist conspiracies against him, Napoleon authorized his agents to seize and execute him. Despite pleas for his life from Joséphine, Napoleon had the duke summarily shot. Although the matter aroused no immediate open opposition, it had the long-term effect of strengthening antagonism toward Napoleon and evoked from Comte Boulay de la Meurthe the observation: “C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute” (It’s worse than a crime, it’s a blunder).

  6 In a moment of vanity, Napoleon observed to his secretary, Bourrienne, “You too will be immortal.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, are you not my secretary?”

  “Name Alexander the Great’s secretary,” was the response.

  7 Searching for a book one day in his library, Napoleon eventually located it on the top-most shelf, beyond his reach. “Permit me, sire,” said the tall Marshal Moncey, stepping forward. “I am higher than Your Majesty.”

  “No, Marshal, you are longer,” Napoleon corrected him, scowling.