Essays on Paul Bourget by Mark Twain

“Dear Madam: As a literary man of some reputation, I have many times had

the pleasure of being entertained by the members of the old aristocracy

of France. I have also many times had the pleasure of being entertained

by the members of the old aristocracy of England. If it may interest

you, I can even tell you that I have several times had the honor of being

entertained by royalty; but my ambition has never been so wild as to

expect that one day I might be entertained by the aristocracy of New

York. No, I do not expect to be entertained by you, nor do I want you to

expect me to entertain you and your friends to-night, for I decline to

keep the engagement.”

Now, I could fill a book on America with reminiscences of this sort,

adding a few chapters on bosses and boodlers, on New York ‘chronique

scandaleuse’, on the tenement houses of the large cities, on the

gambling-hells of Denver, and the dens of San Francisco, and what not!

But not even your nasty article on my country, Mark, will make me do

it.]– We should not think it kind. No matter how much we might have

associated with kings and nobilities, we should not think it right to

crush her with it and make her ashamed of her lowlier walk in life; for

we have a saying, ” Who humiliates my mother includes his own.”

Do I seriously imagine you to be the author of that strange letter,

M. Bourget? Indeed I do not. I believe it to have been surreptitiously

inserted by your amanuensis when your back was turned. I think he did it

with a good motive, expecting it to add force and piquancy to your

article, but it does not reflect your nature, and I know it will grieve

you when you see it. I also think he interlarded many other things which

you will disapprove of when you see them. I am certain that all the

harsh names discharged at me come from him, not you. No doubt you could

have proved me entitled to them with as little trouble as it has cost him

to do it, but it would have been your disposition to hunt game of a

higher quality.

Why, I even doubt if it is you who furnish me all that excellent

information about Balzac and those others. –[“Now the style of M.

Bourget and many other French writers is apparently a closed letter to

Mark Twain; but let us leave that alone. Has he read Erckmann-Chatrian,

Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Edmond About, Cherbuliez, Renan? Has he read

Gustave Droz’s ‘Monsieur, Madame, et Bebe’, and those books which leave

for a long time a perfume about you? Has he read the novels of Alexandre

Dumas, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and Balzac? Has be read Victor Hugo’s

‘Les Miserables’ and ‘Notre Dame de Paris’? Has he read or heard the

plays of Sandeau, Augier, Dumas, and Sardou, the works of those Titans of

modern literature, whose names will be household words all over the world

for hundreds of years to come? He has read La Terre–this kind-hearted,

refined humorist! When Mark Twain visits a garden does he smell the

violets, the roses, the jasmine, or the honeysuckle? No, he goes in the

far-away comer where the soil is prepared. Hear what he says: “I wish M.

Paul Bourget had read more of our novels before he came. It is the only

way to thoroughly understand a people. When I found I was coming to

Paris I read La Terre.”]– All this in simple justice to you–and to me;

for, to gravely accept those interlardings as yours would be to wrong

your head and heart, and at the same time convict myself of being

equipped with a vacancy where my penetration ought to be lodged.

And now finally I must uncover the secret pain, the wee sore from which

the Reply grew–the anecdote which closed my recent article–and consider

how it is that this pimple has spread to these cancerous dimensions.

If any but you had dictated the Reply, M. Bourget, I would know that that

anecdote was twisted around and its intention magnified some hundreds of

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