In sight of Paris — April 16 — 1893.
[DEAREST MOTHER:]
This has been the most beautiful day since February 4th.
It is the first day in which I have been warm. All through I
have had a varnish of warmth every now and again but no real
actual internal warmth — I am now in sight of Paris and it is
the 16th of April, in the eleven weeks which have elapsed
since the 4th of February I have been in Spain, France, Italy,
Germany, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece,
Egypt and Morocco. I have sat on the Rock of Gibraltar,
sailed on the Nile and the Suez Canal and crossed through the
Dardanelles, over the Balkans, the steppes of Hungary and the
Danube and Rhine. I have seen the sphinx by moonlight, the
Parthenon and the Eiffel Tower and in two days more I shall
have seen St. Paul's. What do you think I should like to see
best now? YOU. I have been worrying of late as to
whether
or not I should not come home now and leave Paris for another
time because it seems so rough on you to leave you without
either of your younger sons for so long. But I have thought
it over a great deal and I think it better that I should do
Paris now and leave myself clear for the rest of the year. I
promise you one thing however that I shall not undertake to
stay away so long again; it is too long and one grows out of
things. But nothing I feel, will be so easy or so amusing as
Paris and I intend to get through with it soon and trot home
to you by the middle of August
at the very latest. So,
please write me a deceitful letter and say you do not miss me
at all and that my being so near as Paris makes a great
difference and that I am better out of the way and if Chas
goes to London I shall be near him in case he forgets to put
on his overshoes or involves us in a war with G. B. Now,
mother dear, do write me a cheerful letter and say that you do
not mind waiting until the middle of August for me and when I
come back this time I shall make a long stay with you at
Marion and tell you lots of things I have not written you and
I shall not go away again for ever so long and if I do go I
shall only stay a little while. You have no idea how
interesting this rush across the continent has been. I
started in snow and through marshes covered with ice and long
horned cattle and now we are in such a beautiful clean green
land with green fields and green trees and flowering bushes
which you can smell as the train goes by. I now think that
instead of being a cafe-chantant singer I should rather be an
Austrian baron and own a castle on a hill with a red roofed
village around it. I have spent almost all of the trip
sitting on the platform and enjoying the sight of the queer
peasants and the soldiers and old villages. Tonight I shall
be in "Paris, France" as Morton used to say and I shall get
clean and put on my dress clothes but whether I shall go see
Yvette Guilbert or Rusticana again I do not know. Perhaps
I shall just paddle around the fountain in the Place de la
Concorde and make myself thoroughly at home. With a great
deal of love to Dad and Nora and Chas and all.
DICK.
At the time that Richard's first travel articles appeared
some of his critics took umbrage at the fact that he was
evidently under the delusion that he had discovered London,
Gibraltar, Athens, Paris, and the other cities he had visited,
and that no one else had ever written about them. As a matter
of fact no one could have been more keenly conscious of what
an oft-told tale were the places that he had chosen to
describe. If Richard took it for granted that the reader was
totally unacquainted with the peoples of these cities and
their ways, it was because he believed that that was the best
way to write a descriptive article, always had believed it,
and believed it so long as he wrote. And whatever difference
of opinion may have existed among the critics and the public
as to Richard's fiction, I think it is safe to say that as a
reporter his work of nearly thirty years stood at least as
high as that of any of his contemporaries or perhaps as that
of the reporters of all time. As an editor, when he gave out
an assignment to a reporter to write an article on some
well-worn subject and the reporter protested, Richard's answer
was the same: "You must always remember that that story
hasn't been written until you write it." And when he
suggested to an editor that he would like to write an article
on Broadway, or the Panama Canal, or the ruins of Rome and the
editor disapproved, Richard's argument was: "It hasn't been
done until I do it." And it was not
because he believed for a moment that he could do it better or
as well as it had been done. It was simply because he knew
the old story was always a good story, that is, if it was seen
with new eyes and from a new standpoint. At twenty-eight he
had written a book about England and her people, and the book
had met with much success both in America and England. At
twenty-nine, equally unafraid, he had "covered" the ancient
cities that border the Mediterranean, and now Paris lay before
him! This thought — indeed few thoughts — troubled Richard
very
much in those days of his early successes. He had youth,
friends, a marvellous spirit of adventure, and besides there
are many worse fates than being consigned to spending a few
months in Paris, having a thoroughly joyous time, taking a few
mental notes, and a little later on transferring them to paper
in the quiet of a peaceful summer home at Marion.
Chief among his friends in Paris at this time was Charles
Dana Gibson, who was living in a charming old house in the
Latin Quarter, and where the artist did some of his best work
and made himself extremely popular with both the Parisians and
the American colony. In addition to Gibson there were Kenneth
Frazier, the portrait-painter, and Tina, Newton, and James
Eustis, the daughter and sons of James B. Eustis, who at that
time was our ambassador to France, a most genial and kindly
host, who made much of Richard and his young friends.
