The Reign of Terror interested him.  He reread Carlyle’s Revolution, a book which he was never long without reading, and they all read ’A Tale of Two Cities’.  When the weather permitted they visited the scenes of that grim period.

In his note-book he comments: 

    “The Reign of Terror shows that, without distinction or rank, the
    people were savages.  Marquises, dukes, lawyers, blacksmiths, they
    each figure in due proportion to their crafts.”

And again: 

“For 1,000 years this savage nation indulged itself in massacre; every now and then a big massacre or a little one.  The spirit is peculiar to France—­I mean in Christendom—­no other state has had it.  In this France has always walked abreast, kept her end up with her brethren, the Turks and the Burmese.  Their chief traits—­love of glory and massacre.”

Yet it was his sense of fairness that made him write, as a sort of quittance: 

    “You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. 
    It is the tourists’ custom.  When I see a man jump from the Vendome
    Column I say, ‘They like to do that in Paris.’”

Following this implied atonement, he records a few conclusions, drawn doubtless from Parisian reading and observation: 

    “Childish race and great.”

    “I’m for cremation.”

    “I disfavor capital punishment.”

“Samson was a Jew, therefore not a fool.  The Jews have the best average brain of any people in the world.  The Jews are the only race in the world who work wholly with their brains, and never with their hands.  There are no Jew beggars, no Jew tramps, no Jew ditchers, hod-carriers, day-laborers, or followers of toilsome mechanical trade.

    “They are peculiarly and conspicuously the world’s intellectual
    aristocracy.”

“Communism is idiocy.  They want to divide up the property.  Suppose they did it.  It requires brains to keep money as well as to make it.  In a precious little while the money would be back in the former owner’s hands and the communist would be poor again.  The division would have to be remade every three years or it would do the communist no good.”

A curious thing happened one day in Paris.  Boyesen; in great excitement, came to the Normandy and was shown to the Clemens apartments.  He was pale and could hardly speak, for his emotion.  He asked immediately if. his wife had come to their rooms.  On learning that she had not, he declared that she was lost or had met with an accident.  She had been gone several hours, he said, and had sent no word, a thing which she had never done before.  He besought Clemens to aid him in his search for her, to do something to help him find her.  Clemens, without showing the least emotion or special concentration of interest, said quietly: 

“I will.”

“Where will you go first,” Boyesen demanded.