Sam and his companions left the City of Lights late on the day of the parade and retraced their route back to Marseilles, arriving on July 12. They made a flying trip to Chateau d’If in Marseilles Harbor, the prison setting of Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Count of Monte Cristo, the “authority” that inspires Tom Sawyer’s “rescue” of Jim from his confinement in the ash hopper in the final chapters of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). As Sam wrote his family, “Since we touched dry land we have gone to bed after midnight & rose again at 7 to rush all day.” On July 13 they reboarded the Quaker City, which immediately departed for a three-day run to Italy, and Sam remembered later that the “only rest we had” occurred aboard the ship “when we went on a short voyage from one port to another in the Mediterranean.” The ship docked in Genoa on July 16 and, after a night in the palatial Crois de Malte hotel, Sam and his companions railed to Alessandria, Milan, Bellagio on Lake Como, Arona on Lake Maggiore, Chimasso in Switzerland, Lecco, Bergamo, and Venice. There they registered at the Grand Hotel d’Europe on the Grand Canal and spent the next three days sightseeing around the City of Bridges. On July 26 they entrained via Bologna to Florence, where they registered at a hotel on the Piazza Santa Trinità. The next day they toured the Pitti Palace, the Uffizi Gallery, and the Medici Chapel. On July 28 they took a train via Pisa to Leghorn to rejoin the ship. Because some of the passengers (not including Sam) paid a social call on Giuseppe Garibaldi at his villa while the ship was docked in Genoa, the authorities in Leghorn “mistook us for a piratical revolutionary expedition of some sort or other, with designs against the Government, and therefore sent a gunboat to watch us day and night.” Bursley and several of the passengers, returning to the ship after dark, were even threatened with arrest.14
Meanwhile, in his letters to the United States, Sam repeatedly protested the misbegotten efforts of the Italian port authorities to prevent a cholera epidemic: “purification, suffocation, and fumigation through the medium of a combination of miraculous stinks and stenches such as only Italian ingenuity could contrive.” Worse yet, the authorities permitted “no profanity.” “As far as I can see,” he wrote, “Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful monuments to human folly, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it. She is today one vast museum of magnificence and misery.” Sam omitted this comment when he revised his dispatches for publication in The Innocents Abroad, although elsewhere in his correspondence he expressed some of the same opinions and retained these comments in the book. He referred derisively, for example, to “Jesuit humbuggery” and “priest-ridden Italy,” a land “which has groped in the midnight of priestly superstition for sixteen hundred years!” He pandered to the philistine tastes of his newspaper readers by mocking the Old Masters as frauds, and like the “western barbarian” Christopher Newman, the protagonist of Henry James’s The American, he preferred imitation paintings to the originals: “Wherever you see a Raphael, a Rubens, a Michelangelo, a Carracci, or a da Vinci (and we see them every day), you find artists copying them, and the copies are always the handsomest.”15
He particularly derided Leonardo da Vinci’s damaged and discolored The Last Supper, a “mournful wreck” and “perfect old nightmare of a picture” painted on a “dilapidated wall” in the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. By venting such sentiments, Sam defied a long tradition in art criticism that revered the painting almost as much as the biblical scene it depicted. Over a quarter century earlier Mary Shelley had hailed “the fading inimitable fresco of Leonardo da Vinci.” None of the copyists captured “the expression in our Saviour’s face, such as it is in the original.” The travel writer Anna Jameson saluted the painting in 1848 as “a creation so consummate” that it became “the wonder and the despair of those who have followed in the same path.” On his part, Henry James regarded The Last Supper with piety and veneration: “I have looked at no other picture with an emotion equal to that which rose within me as this great creation of Leonardo slowly began to dawn upon my intelligence from the tranquil twilight of its ruin.”16
But Reeves Jackson and Sam Clemens expressed decidedly dissenting opinions. Jackson, whom Sam dubbed “one of the most companionable Pilgrims that graced this well-nigh graceless excursion,” reported on July 18 in a letter to his hometown Pennsylvania newspaper that Michelangelo’s portrait of Christ and his disciples “has suffered dreadfully from damp, age and violence” and “was violated still more when Napoleon had possession of Milan, the monastery being used as a barrack and this room as a stable.” Sam followed Jackson’s lead in his correspondence with the Alta:
It is battered and scarred in every direction, and stained and discolored by time, and Napoleon’s horses kicked the legs off most of the disciples when they were stabled there more than half a century ago. . . . Simon looks seedy [he was, after all, a lowly fisherman, much like Pap Finn and Bence Blankenship]; John looks sick, and half of the other blurred and damaged apostles have a general expression of discouragement about them.
If, like a backwoods Baptist, Sam scorned the religious sensibility of such art, he flirted with sacrilege when he derided the ubiquitous relics he was shown: “I find a piece of the true cross in every old church I go into, and some of the nails that held it together. . . . I think I have seen as much as a keg of these nails.” In his Italy letters he again deployed the device of comic contrast, usually to the advantage of the Edenic American West: Lake Tahoe was superior to Lake Como, Kilauea to Vesuvius. Venice he publicly compared to an “overflowed Arkansas town” with “a dirty high-water mark on the houses, and the streets full of mud and rubbish.” Privately he joked with a touch of phallic comedy that he “envied the Stones of Venice.” His humor evolved in another way: Whereas he had relied on Jarves’s History of the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands for factual information in his Sacramento Union letters, he effectively parodied in his Alta correspondence such genteel guidebooks as Karl Baedeker’s. He mocked the horrible “caterwaul” of the Venetian gondolier on the one hand, though he celebrated “the free and graceful” movement of the gondola on the other. He sometimes struck a more proper note, as when he contemplated the Milan Cathedral, “the princeliest creation that ever brain of man conceived.” He also venerated the “grand Duomo of Florence,” even though it took “three hundred flabby, greasy vagabonds in holy orders” to run it and “I had it in me to burn it down if I had a chance,” but he was singularly unimpressed by the Basilica of St. Mark’s in Venice with its “coarse mosaics” and “unlovely Byzantine architecture.”17
Sam continued to rant about the fumigations and quarantines inflicted on the excursionists. These vain measures threatened to turn the tour into a continual detour. Sam and Dan Slote fled the Quaker City at Leghorn in late July just before the health authorities declared it an infected port. They sailed on a French steamer to Civitavecchia and from there entrained to Rome, probably on July 27, where they found a room on Pincian Hill. While their movements in the Eternal City are spottily documented, Sam reminisced about them in an interview in 1900:
[W]e got up at 6 in the morning and throughout the whole day, in rain or shine, we made a perpetual procession through picture galleries, churches, museums, palaces—looking at things which for the most part did not interest us one cent but which we thought we had to see. And we saw them. If our meals interfered with our seeing any old thing our meals were put aside. At 9 or 10 at night we returned to our hotel, our brains and our bodies reeling with fatigue and utter exhaustion. My head used to ache, my eyes to swim, but I could not succumb to the terrible temptation to throw myself on the bed, as if I did so I could not rise from it again before morning. I had to resist because we had to see something else by moonlight or because there was a moon or some other foolish notion. . . . What was the result of this insensate sightseeing? Why, that I was so fagged that I lost the capacity to appreciate most of what I saw or to carry away any cohere
nt idea of it.
Just as they had hurried through the Louvre in Paris and the Pitti Palace and Uffizi Gallery in Florence, they “galloped through . . . the Vatican” and “all the galleries” in Rome. Sam later remarked that St. Peter’s “did not look nearly so large as the [U.S.] Capitol, and certainly not a twentieth part as beautiful.” This “surfeit of sightseeing” explains his neglect of his activities in the Eternal City in his reports home.
What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me? What is there for me to touch that others have not touched? What is there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others? What can I discover?—Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. . . . I wished to write a real “guide-book” chapter on this fascinating city, but I could not do it. . . . I have drifted along hopelessly for a hundred pages of manuscript without knowing where to commence. I will not commence at all.
Sam and Dan Slote likely left Rome the morning of August 1 and arrived that evening in Naples, where they planned to rendezvous with the Quaker City.18
The ship also arrived in Naples on August 1, but the authorities there consigned it to quarantine for the first seven of the twelve days it was scheduled to remain in port. William James blamed Duncan for a “blunder with the bill of health,” and Sam and Dan, unable to sleep in their staterooms, registered at a local hotel. The unflappable Bloodgood Cutter, trapped aboard ship, improved the occasion with a poetical lament:
At anchor now our ship is seen,
A riding out her quarantine,
To be kept there in tribulation,
Is to us a great vexation.
And then there is Cutter’s alternative (but no better) quatrain on the same theme:
To quarantine a healthy ship,
On an excursion pleasure trip,
May seem to you all right;
But I can’t see it in that light.
The ship-bound travelers could not touch land, but their compatriots could row into the harbor and shout their greetings so long as they did not board. On August 2, according to the crackpot poet, Sam and Dan hailed them from a skiff:
About noon our friends, with Mr. Slote,
Came out to see us in an open boat;
It was laughable to us in many ways
To see them tantalize us—(six more days!)
In The Innocents Abroad, Sam observed that he rowed out “every day in a boat and request[ed] them to come ashore. It soothes them. We lie ten steps from the ship and tell them how splendid the city is.” In an open letter to the Neapolitan authorities printed in the Naples Observer, Sam appealed, albeit to no avail, for the release of the ship from quarantine on the grounds the passengers had been fumigated “at the Lake of Como, at Lecco, and most infernally at Venice,” and “we have not brought any cholera with us from Leghorn.”19 During the interim, Sam sojourned for two days on the island of Ischia in Naples Harbor.
On August 5, in company with several passengers just released from quarantine, Sam climbed Mount Vesuvius “partly because it was well worth it, and chiefly because I shall never have to do it again.” During the descent, James Foster, an invalid traveling on the Quaker City for his health, “was being carried down in a chair suspended to a pole between two guides,” according to William James, “when one fell, sending the Colonel on ahead; after performing three or four somersaults, he was finally caught by the other guide without sustaining much injury.” Sam alluded obliquely to the accident in The Innocents Abroad: the “native pirates will carry you . . . in a sedan chair, if you wish it, but suppose they were to slip and let you fall,—is it likely that you would ever stop rolling? Not this side of eternity, perhaps.” Three days later, Sam joined several other passengers on excursions to Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the Blue Grotto on the island of Capri. In one of the few extant private letters Sam wrote during these weeks he averred that “Italy is a beautiful land, & its daughters are as fair as the moon that holds her silvery course above their heads & its traditions are rich with the poetry & romance of the old crusading days,—happy days! glorious days but destined never to return!” Publicly, however, he recounted his tour of Italy in his newspaper letters, with rare exceptions, in a satirical vein.20 In Pompeii he walked through a brothel that had been excavated from volcanic ash and rock, and his description of it left little to the imagination:
In the bawdy-house (the only building in Pompeii which no woman is now allowed to enter,) were the small rooms and short beds of solid masonry, just as they were in the old times, and on the walls were pictures which looked almost as fresh as if they were painted yesterday, but which no pen could have the hardihood to describe; and here and there were Latin inscriptions—vulgar, obscene scintillations of wit scratched by hands that possibly were uplifted to Heaven for succor in the midst of a driving storm of fire before the night was done.
Bret Harte alluded to this passage, printed in the Alta for September 29, in his San Francisco letter to the Springfield Republican dated October 8.21
The Quaker City weighed anchor in the Bay of Naples the morning of August 11, bypassed Sicily, sailed through the Greek islands, and arrived at the port of Athens around noon on August 14. There they were again denied landing privileges and slapped with an eleven-day quarantine seven miles from shore but within sight of the Acropolis and Mars Hill, where St. Paul had debated Athenian philosophers. The pilgrims were disgusted, of course. Moses Beach grumbled that “this one act” by the Athenian authorities seemed “not a whit removed from barbarism,” and Duncan lambasted “the stupid Athenians” in his log. “Rather than be cooped up at anchor remote from shore,” Sam noted in his journal, Duncan chose “to lie still 24 hours & then sail direct for Constantinople,” skipping scheduled stops in Palermo and Corinth. That night at about 10:30 under cover of darkness—but with a full moon—two groups of men from the ship, one consisting of Sam, Colonel Denny, Reeves Jackson, and George B. Birch, a physician from Hannibal, Missouri, successfully ran the blockade. They landed outside the quarantine zone and skirted the town, “avoiding all roads and houses.” During the five hours they were ashore they “straggled over the hills, serenaded by a hundred dogs,” and climbed the Acropolis. Aboard ship, James traced their progress even at a great distance “by the incessant barking that was kept up by the dogs.” Sam described the view from the crest of the Acropolis in his journal: “Athens spread out right underneath our feet, 200 feet below us, & the grand white ruin of the Parthenon towering over our heads! Athens by moonlight! When I forget it I shall be dead—not before.” They scurried back to the ship, arriving around 4:30 a.m., just before dawn, attracting no attention except from the guards at the vineyards where they filched grapes.22
The excursionists sailed for Turkey at noon on August 15, through the Dardanelles, arriving in Constantinople at dawn two days later. The Turks “proved better Christians than their more pretentiously wise neighbors, the Greeks,” Beach reported, “and the door of entrance to the Turkish capital was thrown wide open.” During the two days the ship was docked there, again for recoaling, the passengers were allowed ample opportunity to sightsee, not that they reveled in what they saw. The city was so “filthy and offensive,” according to Moult, that the pilgrims nicknamed it Dogtown after the packs of feral brutes that roamed the streets. Similarly, William Denny decried the “numerous ugly and noisy dogs” that wandered the “dirty narrow stinking streets,” James noted the “filthy streets” that were “infected with as many dogs as Turks,” and Emily Severance, too, remarked on the “surly, dirty, and ill-formed” dogs of the city. On his part, Sam characteristically took another tack: he sympathized with the hounds. He conceded that Constantinople was squalid—the people “smell like a slaughter-house in summer,” a stench he remembered from his Hannibal boyhood—but he argued “that the celebrated dogs of Constantinople have been misrepresented—slandered.” Far from ferocious, in Sam’s estimation, they were “sad-visaged” and “broken-hearted” and slept “placidly�
� in the streets. Their “official position” was to “eat anything and everything” from “melon rinds and spoiled grapes” to “their own dead friends and relatives” and so partially sweep the town. He added that many of them “never budged their bodies an inch. I thought I was lazy, but I am a steam engine compared to a Constantinople dog.” As in his Italian letters, moreover, Sam repeatedly contrasted the United States and Turkey—always to the advantage of the former. “What are the dancing dervishes to the negro minstrels?” he asked, for example. “What is Oriental splendor to the Black Crook? New York has fifty wonders where Constantinople has one!”23
But Turkey could claim at least one distinction: its streets and byways featured more human deformity than any other nation on earth:
If you want dwarfs—I mean just a few dwarfs for curiosity—go to Genoa. If you want to buy them by the gross, for retail, go to Milan. There are plenty of dwarfs all over Italy, but it did not seem to me that in Milan the crop was luxuriant. If you would see a fair average style of assorted cripples, go to Naples, or travel through the Roman States. But if you would see the very heart and home of cripples and human monsters, go straight to Constantinople.
The Life of Mark Twain Page 61