Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1

by Mark Twain

  This is a good house, but it cost very little, and is simplicity itself, and pretty primitive in most of its features. The water is pumped to the ground floor from a well by hand labor, and then carried up stairs by hand. There is no drainage; the cesspools are right under the windows. This is the case with everybody’s villa.

  The doors in this house are like the doors of the majority of the houses and hotels of Italy—plain, thin, unpaneled boards painted white. This makes the flimsiest and most unattractive door known to history. The knob is not a knob, but a thing like the handle of a gimlet—you can get hold of it only with your thumb and forefinger. Still, even that is less foolish than our American door-knob, which is always getting loose and turning futilely round and round in your hand, accomplishing nothing.

  The windows are all of the rational continental breed; they open apart, like doors; and when they are bolted for the night they don’t rattle, and a person can go to sleep.

  There are cunning little fireplaces in the bedrooms and sitting-rooms, and lately a big aggressive looking German stove has been set up on the south frontier of the Great Sahara.

  The stairs are made of granite blocks, the hallways of the second floor are of red brick. It is a safe house. Earthquakes cannot shake it down, fire cannot burn it. There is absolutely nothing burnable but the furniture, the curtains and the doors. There is not much furniture, it is merely summer furniture—or summer bareness, if you like. When a candle set fire to the curtains in a room over my head the other night where samples of the family slept, I was wakened out of my sleep by shouts and screams, and was greatly terrified until an answer from the window told me what the matter was: that the window curtains and hangings were on fire. In America I should have been more frightened than ever, then, but this was not the case here. I advised the samples to let the fire alone, and go to bed; which they did, and by the time they got to sleep there was nothing of the attacked fabrics left. We boast a good deal in America of our fire departments, the most efficient and wonderful in the world, but they have something better than that to boast of in Europe—a rational system of building which makes human life safe from fire and renders fire departments needless. We boast of a thing which we ought to be ashamed to require.

  This villa has a roomy look, a spacious look; and when the sunshine is pouring in and lighting up the bright colors of the shiny floors and walls and ceilings there is a large and friendly suggestion of welcome about the aspects, but I do not know that I have ever seen a continental dwelling which quite met the American standard of a home in all the details. There is a trick about an American house that is like the deep-lying untranslatable idioms of a foreign language—a trick uncatchable by the stranger, a trick incommunicable and undescribable; and that elusive trick, that intangible something, whatever it is, is just the something that gives the home look and the home feeling to an American house and makes it the most satisfying refuge yet invented by men—and women, mainly women. The American house is opulent in soft and varied colors that please and rest the eye, and in surfaces that are smooth and pleasant to the touch, in forms that are shapely and graceful, in objects without number which compel interest and cover nakedness; and the night has even a higher charm than the day, there, for the artificial lights do really give light instead of merely trying and failing; and under their veiled and tinted glow all the snug cosiness and comfort and charm of the place is at its best and loveliest. But when night shuts down on the continental home there is no gas or electricity to fight it, but only dreary lamps of exaggerated ugliness and of incomparable poverty in the matter of effectiveness.

  Sept. 29. ’92. I seem able to forget everything except that I have had my head shaved. No matter how closely I shut myself away from drafts it seems to be always breezy up there. But the main difficulty is the flies. They like it up there better than anywhere else; on account of the view, I suppose. It seems to me that I have never seen any flies before that were shod like these. These appear to have talons. Wherever they put their foot down they grab. They walk over my head all the time, and cause me infinite torture. It is their park, their club, their summer resort. They have garden parties there, and conventions, and all sorts of dissipation. And they fear nothing. All flies are daring, but these are more daring than those of other nationalities. These cannot be scared away by any device. They are more diligent, too, than the other kinds: they come before daylight and stay till after dark. But there are compensations. The mosquitoes are not a trouble. There are very few of them, they are not noisy, and not much interested in their calling. A single unkind word will send them away, if said in English, which impresses them because they do not understand it, then they come no more that night. We often see them weep when they are spoken to harshly. I have got some of the eggs to take home. If this breed can be raised in our climate they will be a great advantage. There seem to be no fleas here. This is the first time we have struck this kind of an interregnum in fifteen months. Everywhere else the supply exceeds the demand.

  Oct. 1. Finding that the coachman was taking his meals in the kitchen, I reorganized the contract to include his board, at thirty francs a month. That is what it would cost him up above us in the village, and I think I can feed him for two hundred and save thirty out of it. Saving thirty is better than not saving anything.

  That passage from the diary reminds me that I did an injudicious thing along about that time which bore fruit later. As I was to give the coachman, Vittorio, a monthly pourboire, of course I wanted to know the amount. So I asked the coachman’s padrone (master), instead of asking somebody else—anybody else. He said thirty francs a month would be about right. I was afterwards informed that this was an overcharge, but that it was customary, there being no customary charges except overcharges. However, at the end of that month the coachman demanded an extra pourboire of fifteen francs. When I asked why, he said his padrone had taken his other pourboire away from him. The padrone denied this in Vittorio’s presence, and Vittorio seemed to retract. The padrone said he did, and he certainly had that aspect, but I had to take the padrone’s word for it as interpreter of the coachman’s Italian. When the padrone was gone the coachman resumed the charge, and as we liked him—and also believed him—we made his aggregate pourboire forty-five francs a month after that, and never doubted that the padrone took two-thirds of it. We were told by citizens that it was customary for the padrone to seize a considerable share of his dependents’ pourboire, and also the custom for the padrone to deny it. That padrone is an accommodating man, and a most capable and agreeable talker, speaking English like an archangel, and making it next to impossible for a body to be dissatisfied with him; yet his seventy-ton landau has kept us supplied with lame horses for nine months, whereas we were entitled to a light carriage suited to hill-climbing, and fastidious people would have made him furnish it.

  The Cerretani family, of old and high distinction in the great days of the Republic, lived on this place during many centuries. Along in October we began to notice a pungent and suspicious odor which we were not acquainted with and which gave us some little apprehension, but I laid it on the dog, and explained to the family that that kind of a dog always smelt that way when he was up to windward of the subject, but privately I knew it was not the dog at all. I believed it was our adopted ancestors, the Cerretanis. I believed they were preserved under the house somewhere, and that it would be a good scheme to get them out and air them. But I was mistaken. I made a secret search and had to acquit the ancestors. It turned out that the odor was a harmless one. It came from the wine-crop, which was stored in a part of the cellars to which we had no access. This discovery gave our imaginations a rest; and it turned a disagreeable smell into a pleasant one. But not until we had so long and so lavishly flooded the house with odious disinfectants that the dog left and the family had to camp in the yard most of the time. It took two months to disinfect the disinfectants and persuade our wealth of atrocious stenches to emigrate. When they were finally all gone and the wi
ne-fragrance resumed business at the old stand, we welcomed it with effusion and have had no fault to find with it since.

  Oct. 6. I find myself at a disadvantage here. Four persons in the house speak Italian and nothing else, one person speaks German and nothing else, the rest of the talk is in the French, English and profane languages. I am equipped with but the merest smattering in these tongues, if I except one or two. Angelo speaks French—a French which he could get a patent on, because he invented it himself; a French which no one can understand, a French which resembles no other confusion of sounds heard since Babel, a French which curdles the milk. He prefers it to his native Italian. He loves to talk it; loves to listen to himself; to him it is music; he will not let it alone. The family would like to get their little Italian savings into circulation, but he will not give change. It makes no difference what language he is addressed in, his reply is in French—his peculiar French, his grating uncanny French, which sounds like shoveling anthracite down a coal-chute. I know a few Italian words and several phrases, and along at first I used to keep them bright and fresh by whetting them on Angelo; but he partly couldn’t understand them and partly didn’t want to, so I have been obliged to withdraw them from the market for the present. But this is only temporary. I am practising, I am preparing. Some day I shall be ready for him, and not in ineffectual French, but in his native tongue. I will seethe this kid in its mother’s milk.

  Oct. 27. The first month is finished. We are wonted, now. It is agreed that life at a Florentine villa is an ideal existence. The weather is divine, the outside aspects lovely, the days and the nights tranquil and reposeful, the seclusion from the world and its worries as satisfactory as a dream. There is no housekeeping to do, no plans to make, no marketing to superintend—all these things do themselves, apparently. One is vaguely aware that somebody is attending to them, just as one is aware that the world is being turned over and the constellations worked and the sun shoved around according to the schedule, but that is all; one does not feel personally concerned, or in any way responsible. Yet there is no head, no chief executive; each servant minds his or her own department, requiring no supervision and having none. They hand in elaborately itemized bills once a week, then the machinery goes silently on again, just as before. There is no noise, or fussing, or quarreling or confusion—up stairs. I don’t know what goes on below. Late in the afternoons friends come out from the city and drink tea in the open air, and tell what is happening in the world; and when the great sun sinks down upon Florence and the daily miracle begins, they hold their breath and look. It is not a time for talk.

  INTERVAL OF TWO YEARS

  Now comes the New York dictation,

  beginning January 9, 1906.

  Note for the Instruction of Future Editors

  and Publishers of This Autobiography

  I shall scatter through this Autobiography newspaper clippings without end. When I do not copy them into the text it means that I do not make them a part of the autobiography—at least not of the earlier editions. I put them in on the theory that if they are not interesting in the earlier editions, a time will come when it may be well enough to insert them for the reason that age is quite likely to make them interesting although in their youth they may lack that quality.

  January 9, 1906

  The more I think of this, the more nearly impossible the project seems. The difficulties of it grow upon me all the time. For instance, the idea of blocking out a consecutive series of events which have happened to me, or which I imagine have happened to me—I can see that that is impossible for me. The only thing possible for me is to talk about the thing that something suggests at the moment—something in the middle of my life, perhaps, or something that happened only a few months ago.

  The only way is for me to write an autobiography—and then, in your case, if you are going to collect from that mass of incidents a brief biography, why you would have to read the thing through and select certain matter—arrange your notes and then write a biography. That biography would have to be measured by the mass of the autobiography. You would publish this during my life—that is your idea? (Meaning Mr. Paine’s book.)

  Mr. Paine said: The time of publication could be determined later.

  Mr. Clemens. Yes, that is so, and what is your idea as to length?

  Mr. Paine. The autobiography ought not to exceed 100,000 words? If it grew, and was very interesting, then it could run out to 120,000?

  Mr. Clemens. I should make it in a general way 80,000 words, with 20,000 privilege.

  It is my purpose to extend these autobiographical notes to 600,000 words, and possibly more. But that is going to take a long time—a long time.

  Mr. Paine. These notes that we are making here will be of the greatest assistance to you in writing the autobiography.

  Mr. Clemens. My idea is this: that I write an autobiography. When that autobiography is finished—or before it is finished, but no doubt after it is finished—then you take the manuscript and we can agree on how much of a biography to make, 80 or 100,000 words, and in that way we can manage it. But this is no holiday excursion—it is a journey. So my idea is that I do the autobiography, that I own the manuscript, and that I pay for it, and that finally, at the proper time, why then you begin to gather from this manuscript your biography.

  Mr. Paine. You have a good deal of this early material in readiness. Suppose while you are doing this autobiography you place portions of that, from time to time, in my hands, so that I can begin to prepare my notes and material for the other book.

  Mr. Clemens. That can be arranged. Supposing that we should talk here for one or two hours five days in the week—or several days in the week, as it should happen—how many thousand years is it going to take to put together as much as 600,000 words? Let us proceed on this idea, then, and start it, and see, after a few days, if it is going to work.

  Now then, let us arrive at the cost of this—say it is to be so many thousand words. You charge in that way, don’t you? (One dollar an hour for dictation, and five cents a hundred words for writing out notes.) We will try this—see whether it is dull or interesting, or whether it will bore us and we will want to commit suicide. I hate to get at it. I hate to begin, but I imagine that if you are here to make suggestions from time to time, we can make it go along, instead of having it drag.

  January 9, 1906.

  Now let me see, there was something I wanted to talk about—and I supposed it would stay in my head. I know what it is—about the big Bonanza in Nevada. I want to read from the commercial columns of the New York Times, of a day or two ago, what practically was the beginning of the great Bonanza in Nevada, and these details seem to me to be correct—that in Nevada, during 1871, John Mackay and Fair got control of the “Consolidated Virginia Mine” for $26,000; that in 1873, two years later, its 108,000 shares sold at $45 per share; and that it was at that time that Fair made the famous silver ore find of the great Bonanza. Also, according to these statistics, in November ’74 the stock went to 115, and in the following month suddenly jumped up to 610, and in the next month—January ’75—it reached 700. The shares of the companion mine, the “California,” rose in four months from 37 to 780—a total property which in 1869 was valued on the Mining Exchange at $40,000, was quoted six years later at $160,000,000. I think those dates are correct. That great Bonanza occupies a rather prominent place in my mind for the reason that I knew persons connected with it. For instance, I knew John Mackay very well—that would be in 1862, ’63 and ’64, I should say. I don’t remember what he was doing when I came to Virginia in 1862 from starving to death down in the so-called mines of Esmeralda, which consisted in that day merely of silver-bearing quartz—plenty of bearing, and didn’t have much load to carry in the way of silver—and it was a happy thing for me when I was summoned to come up to Virginia City to be local editor of the Virginia City Enterprise during three months, while Mr. William H. Wright should go East, to Iowa, and visit his family whom he hadn’t seen for s
ome years. I took the position of local editor with joy, because there was a salary of forty dollars a week attached to it and I judged that that was all of thirty-nine dollars more than I was worth, and I had always wanted a position which paid in the opposite proportion of value to amount of work. I took that position with pleasure, not with confidence—but I had a difficult job. I was to furnish one column of leaded nonpareil every day, and as much more as I could get on paper before the paper should go to press at two o’clock in the morning. By and by, in the course of a few months I met John Mackay, with whom I had already been well acquainted for some time. He had established a broker’s office on C street, in a new frame house, and it was rather sumptuous for that day and place, for it had part of a carpet on the floor and two chairs instead of a candle-box. I was envious of Mackay, who had not been in such very smooth circumstances as this before, and I offered to trade places with him—take his business and let him have mine—and he asked me how much mine was worth. I said forty dollars a week. He said “I never swindled anybody in my life, and I don’t want to begin with you. This business of mine is not worth forty dollars a week. You stay where you are and I will try to get a living out of this.”

  I left Nevada in 1864 to avoid a term in the penitentiary (in another chapter I shall have to explain that) so that it was all often years, apparently, before John Mackay developed suddenly into the first of the hundred-millionaires. Apparently his prosperity began in ’71—that discovery was made in ’71. I know how it was made. I remember those details, for they came across the country to me in Hartford. There was a tunnel 1,700 feet long which struck in from ’way down on the slope of the mountain and passed under some portion of Virginia City, at a great depth. It was striking for a lode which it did not find, and I think the search had been long abandoned. Now in groping around in that abandoned tunnel Mr. Fair (afterwards U.S. Senator and multimillionaire,) came across a body of rich ore—so the story ran—and he came and reported his find to John Mackay. They examined this treasure and found that there was a very great deposit of it. They prospected it in the usual way and proved its magnitude, and that it was extremely rich. They thought it was a “chimney”—belonging probably to the “California,” away up on the mountain-side, which had an abandoned shaft—or possibly the “Virginia” mine which was not worked then—nobody caring anything about the “Virginia,” an empty mine. These men determined that this body of ore properly belonged to the “California” mine and by some trick of nature had been shaken down the mountain-side. They got O’Brien—who was a silver expert in San Francisco—to come in as capitalist, and they bought up a controlling interest in the abandoned claims, and no doubt got it at that figure—$26,000,—six years later to be worth $160,000,000.