remark, nor anything resembling it. Moreover, the magazine would not
have allowed me to use so gross a word as that.

You told an anecdote. A funny one--I admit that. It hit a foible of
our American aristocracy, and it stung me--I admit that; it stung me
sharply. It was like this: You found some ancient portraits of French
kings in the gallery of one of our aristocracy, and you said:

"He has the Grand Monarch, but where is the portrait of his
grandfather?" That is, the American aristocrat's grandfather.

Now that hits only a few of us, I grant--just the upper crust only--but
it hits exceedingly hard.

I wondered if there was any way of getting back at you. In one of your
chapters I found this chance:

"In our high Parisian existence, for instance, we find applied to arts
and luxury, and to debauchery, all the powers and all the weaknesses of
the French soul."

You see? Your "higher Parisian" class--not everybody, not the nation,
but only the top crust of the Ovation--applies to debauchery all the
powers of its soul.

I argued to myself that that energy must produce results. So I built
an anecdote out of your remark. In it I make Napoleon Bonaparte say
to me--but see for yourself the anecdote (ingeniously clipped and
curtailed) in paragraph eleven of your Reply.--[So, I repeat, Mark Twain
does not like M. Paul Bourget's book. So long as he makes light fun
of the great French writer he is at home, he is pleasant, he is the
American humorist we know. When he takes his revenge (and where is the
reason for taking a revenge?) he is unkind, unfair, bitter, nasty.]

For example: See his answer to a Frenchman who jokingly remarks to him:

"I suppose life can never get entirely dull to an American, because
whenever he can't strike up any other way to put in his time, he can
always get away with a few years trying to find out who his grandfather
was."

Hear the answer:

"I reckon a Frenchman's got his little standby for a dull time, too;
because when all other interests fail, he can turn in and see if he
can't find out who his father was."

The first remark is a good-humored bit of chaffing on American snobbery.
I may be utterly destitute of humor, but I call the second remark a
gratuitous charge of immorality hurled at the French women--a remark
unworthy of a man who has the ear of the public, unworthy of a
gentleman, a gross insult to a nation friendly to America, a nation that
helped Mark Twain's ancestors in