Buf. 22d.
Friend Bliss—
My map is attracting a deal of attention.1 We get letters requesting copies from everywhere. Now what you need is something to make the postmasters & the public preserve your posters about “Innocents” & stick them up & if you would put that map & accompanying testimonials2 right in the centre of the poster [& the ] thing is accomplished, sure.
If you want to do this, write or telegraph me at once, & I will have a stereotype made & send to you.3
Ys
Clemens.
[letter docketed:] 
[and] Mark
Twain | Sept 22/70
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
To Be Continued.—As we have been unable to
supply the demand for Saturday’s issue of the
Express, we hereby give
notice that the “Map of the Fortifications of
Paris,” will be published in the Weekly Express which will be issued Wednesday morning.
(“City and Vicinity,” 4) Publication of the weekly on Wednesday (21
September), rather than on Thursday as customary, was perhaps
intended to meet the feverish demand for the map, which was a
broadside supplement to the paper (BAL, 3320). Clemens also reprinted it, as “Mark
Twain’s Map of Paris,” in the Galaxy for November, explaining there
that he did so “to satisfy the extraordinary demand
for it which has arisen in military circles throughout the
country” (SLC 1870, 724). In February 1871, Donn
Piatt, Washington correspondent of the Cincinnati Commercial, reported a conversation in
which Clemens described the circumstances of the
map’s creation: “Only think,” said
he, “I knew that confounded thing had to be
done, and, with a dear friend lying dead before me, and my
wife half distracted over the loss, I had to get off my
articles so as not to disappoint my publishers, and when I
sat down with a board and penknife, to engrave that map of
Paris, I did so with a heavy heart, and in a house of
lamentation.” (Piatt 1871) The dear friend was surely Emma Nye, not Jervis
Langdon, as has been suggested (Steinbrink, 205–6
n. 8). Langdon died on 6 August in Elmira. Nye
“lingered a month” in Buffalo, mortally
ill, and finally expired on 29 September, twelve days after
the map was first published (13 Oct 70 to
Fairbanks). Nevertheless, Clemens persisted in
believing that he created the map after, or very shortly
before, Nye died. In his notebook for 1900, he specifically
linked the map with her death: Map of Paris. Emma Nye lying dead. Reversing the map was not
intentional—it was heedlessness. (Notebook 43,
TS page 3, CU-MARK) And in 1906, he connected the map with the
“last two or three days” of her illness: Those two or three days are among the
blackest, the gloomiest, the most wretched of my long
life. The resulting periodical and sudden
changes of mood in me, from deep melancholy to half insane
tempests and cyclones of humor, are among the curiosities
of my life. During one of those spasms of humorous
possession I sent down to my newspaper office for a huge
wooden capital M and turned it
upside-down and carved a crude and absurd map of Paris
upon it, and published it, along with a sufficiently
absurd description of it, with guarded and imaginary
compliments of it bearing the signatures of General Grant
and other experts. (AD, 15 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 251) After Clemens’s own death in 1910,
Josephus N. Larned recalled that Clemens also worked on the
map at the Express offices: I doubt if he ever enjoyed anything more
than the jackknife engraving that he did on a piece of
board for a military Map of the Siege of Paris, which was
printed in The Express from his original
“plate,” with accompanying
explanations and comments. His half day of whittling and
the laughter that went with it are something that I find
pleasant to remember. (Larned 1910)
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L4, 198–200; MTLP, 39–40.
Provenance:see Mendoza Collection in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
Although the letter was written on a folder with the monogram
llc
, Clemens made some effort to avoid emphasizing it by
turning over the folder and beginning his letter on page 4.
& the • [sic]
