In 1867 Samuel Clemens embarked on a five-month cruise of Europe and the Holy Land aboard the steamer Quaker City. Throughout his trip he sent back travel letters to the San Francisco Alta California and the New York Tribune newspapers. In a letter to his mother dated September 1 and 2, 1867, Clemens wrote that he had penned two letters from Paris, France. These were listed among a long list of places from which Clemens remembered writing. However, while aboard the ship, he had no knowledge which letters the newspapers had actually received or were publishing. Dewey Ganzel in Mark Twain Abroad; The Cruise of the Quaker City states that the first letter from Paris, France was lost in transit. Scholars have speculated that possibly fourteen letters were lost in the mails or never used. In 1904 Clemens himself recalled, "During the trip I wrote and sent the fifty letters; six of them miscarried" (Mark Twain's Autobiography, 1924). His personal notebook for the time period of July 3 through August 10, 1867 is lost.
According to Ganzel, Clemens spent about a week in Paris in July 1867:
Monday night he went to Jardin Mabille, perhaps the most famous of the French bals, country dance pavilions which were open for two or three nights a week during the summer months. The Mabille was an elegant garden with a large dance floor and comfortable places to take refreshment. Here and there throughout the gardens were other amusements--games of chance such as jeu de bagues and quoits and swings and Chinese billiard tables. Clemens, of course, was immediately attracted to the billiards, but it was not the game he knew and the tables were very bad. The bals were respectable places of amusement, certainly, but they were not all propriety; women, for instance, could attend unescorted and were always admitted free. ... It was probably here that Clemens first saw performed the cancan which he described with mock modesty in Innocents Abroad (Ganzel, p. 117).
The Jardin Mabille is described thus in Galignani's New Paris Guide for 1867: "The company at this elegant garden...generally comes under the description of 'the gayest of the gay' and the licence of the dance is frequently carried beyond the limits of propriety" (p. 479).
Clemens's travel letters that first appeared in the newspapers were collected, revised and published in book form in The Innocents Abroad in July 1869. Regarding French women, he wrote the following:
Ah, the grisettes! I had almost forgotten. They are another romantic fraud. They were (if you let the books of travel tell it) always so beautiful - so neat and trim, so graceful - so naive and trusting - so gentle, so winning - so faithful to their shop duties, so irresistible to buyers in their prattling importunity - so devoted to their poverty-stricken students of the Latin Quarter - so light-hearted and happy on their Sunday picnics in the suburbs - and oh, so charmingly, so delightfully immoral!
Stuff! For three or four days I was constantly saying:
"Quick, Ferguson! is that a grisette?"
And he always said "No."
He comprehended, at last, that I wanted to see a grisette. Then he showed me dozens of them. They were like nearly all the Frenchwomen I ever saw - homely. They had large hands, large feet, large mouths; they had pug-noses as a general thing, and mustaches that not even good breeding could overlook; they combed their hair straight back without parting; they were ill-shaped, they were not winning, they were not graceful; I knew by their looks that they ate garlic and onions; and lastly and finally, to my thinking it would be base flattery to call them immoral.
- The Innocents Abroad, chapter 15
The following news article appeared in the Atlanta Daily Constitution newspaper on February 18, 1878, over eight years after The Innocents Abroad was published. How did the newspaper obtain the story? Did the long lost letter from Paris finally surface? Was it reprinted from a lost letter or Clemens's lost notebook? These questions remain unanswered. The sketch is one of ribald humor, typical of Twain, and the impression is that he is most likely writing about a French prostitute with bad breath, rather than French nobility.
_____
On my arrival in Paris I inquired what was the best place to spend an evening, and was told the most aristocratic place of resort was in the Jardin Mabille. I took a cab and proceeded thither. I found myself in a beautiful garden brilliantly lighted. There was a crowd of ladies and gentlemen, a fine band was playing and a quadrille forming. While I was gazing about, a gentleman asked me if I wished to dance. I said that I would like to, but that I was a stranger and not acquainted with any of the nobility present. He smiled and said the French nobility were exceedingly affable and obliging, and that he would be pleased to introduce me to a lady of high rank and varied accomplishments, who would dance with me if I wished. When he presented me to the young Duchess d'Assofoetida (that's as near as I could catch the name.)
I had never stood face to face with a duchess before, and therefore felt diffident and ill at ease. The graceful creature understood my case at once, and within two or three minutes made me feel perfectly at home--more than at home, I may say. I never met a lady so easy to get acquainted with as she was. It must require a high cultivation, only to be attained in the upper ranks of society, to give one such self-possession as hers. This duchess smiled upon me in the most encouraging way, and tapped me on the shoulder with her fan, and then she looked up into my face and charmed away all my embarrassment with a burst of cheery laughter that was full of happiness and garlic.
Next, she took my arm, beating time to the music with her fan, and still uttering that fragrant laughter. Next she put her arm around my neck. This was somewhat unexpected, I must say. It made me feel blissfully uncomfortable. I enjoyed it, but at the same time I was afraid it might attract attention. I intimated as gently as I could that the duke, her father, might be in the crowd somewhere; but she only laughed more odorously than ever. I feared the paternal duke might invite me to breakfast on pistols and coffee. I like coffee, but I do not consider that it improves it to mix it with hardware. This I hinted to the duchess, and she received it with one of those peculiar laughs of hers that was perfectly smothering.
Just then the music struck up furiously, the duchess exclaimed, "Come!" and dashed away with me. The crowd closed up to our set, and walled it on every side. I had never before seen so much curiosity displayed in a mere quadrille by disinterested parties. Dukes and duchesses began to prance to and fro in the dance with wild energy of purpose and extravagance of gesture.
I began to get interested. I glanced across, my partner was just turning; she miscalculated the length of her limbs and lifted her dress accordingly; she came prancing over; I sallied forth to meet her, and when we were within a yard of each other, I wish I may never be believed again if she did not kick the hat off of my head! I stooped to pick it up and a noble aristocrat fell over me; others followed him--both ladies and gentlemen--and I never saw such a chaos of struggling limbs and frantic drapery since the benches broke down at the circus when I was a boy. It was pure good fortune that nobody got hurt.
When I got out I went to my place at the head of the quadrille and stayed there. I had lost confidence; this dance was too high toned for me. It had peculiarities about it that were new and unexpected. I had seen plenty of quadrilles, but I had never seen one with the variations before. The duchess resumed here mad career, and the nobility danced just as she did. Each sex seemed to have but one object in view--to outdo its opposite in violence of action and eccentricity of conduct. These French people are very Frenchy. If I had not known that these people were the flower of the French nobility I should have thought that they began their education in a gymnasium and graduated in a circus.
The first time the duchess halted by my side, I whispered to her to calm her gushing spirits, not to meddle with her dress, and for public opinion's sake, not to step so high. I said she could get over just as much ground at a moderate gait; and, beside the noble grand duke, her father, might happen along at any moment. I might as well have talked to the wind. She only laughed that characteristic laugh of hers that silvery laugh that I could recognize anywhere if I were to the leeward, and then, bending a little, she grabbed up the sides of her apparel with both hands, began to jerk it to and fro in a violent manner, threw her magnificent head back and skipped furiously away on an Irish jig step, all excitement, wild hilarity, distracted costume, frenzied motion! A spectacle to seal the eye-balls and to astonish the soul of a hermit! And when she reached the centre she snatched her cumbering dresses free and launched a kick at the hat of a tall nobleman that fairly loosened the scalp on top of his head. I fled the scene, exclaiming, "what can she mean by such conduct as those?"
I admire Paris; but in my opinion, the ways of its nobility are not what they ought to be.
