Mark Twain Speaking

47. Fréchette Dinner

166 MARK TWAIN SPEAKING Text / Composite, based upon: "Mark Twain on the Pilgrims," Times, December 26, 1881; "Mark Twain on Pilgrim Affairs," Courant, December 27, 1881; "Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims" in MTS(10): 17-24; and MTS(23):86-92. William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson / Robinson, a young London merchant, and Stephenson, a Yorkshire farmer, came to America in 1657. For preaching the mild doctrine of the Society of Friends, both were hanged on Boston Common in 1659. Elizabeth Hooton / (d. 1672). In New England as a sixty-year-old missionary, she was imprisoned byJohn Endicott, whipped through Cambridge, Dedham, and Watertown, then left to starve in a forest. She managed to get to Rhode Island, then to Barbadoes, where her death was probably hastened by the barbarities of the pious New Englanders. -47· Louis Honore Frechette, the Canadian laureate, was a great admirer ofMark Twain. When the poet came to the United States soon after the two men had met in Montreal in 1881, the latter was an obvious choicefor the toast list of the dinner that welcomed the visitor. At a Dinner for Monsieur Frechette of Quebec Hotel Windsor, Holyoke, Massachusetts, January 31, 1882 I have broken a vow in order that I might give myself the pleasure of meeting my friend Frechette again. But that is nothing to brag about; a person who is rightly constructed will break a vow any time to meet a friend. Before I last met Monsieur Frechette, he had become the child of good fortune-that is to say, his poems had been crowned by the Academy of France; since I last met him he has become the child of good fortune once more-that is to say, I have translated his poems MARK TWAIN SPEAKING 167 into English, and written a eulogy of them in the French language to preface the work. He possessed a single-barreled fame before; he will possess a double-barreled fame now; translations always reverse a thing, and bring an entirely new side of it into view, thus doubling the property and making two things out of what was only one thing before. So, in my translation his pathetic poems have naturally become humorous, his humorous poems have become sad. Anybody who knows even the rudiments of arithmetic will know that Monsieur Frechette's poems are now worth exactly twice as much as they were before. I am glad to help welcome the laureate of Quebec to our soil; and I assure him that we will do our best to leave him no room to regret that he came. Yes, as I was saying, I broke a vow. Ifit had been a trim, shiny, brand new one, I should be sorry, ofcourse, for it is always wrong and a pity to mistreat and injure good new property; but this one was different; I don't regret this one, because it was an old ragged ramshackle vow that had seen so much service and been broken so often, and patched and spliced together in so many places, that it was become a disgraceful object, and so rotten that I could never venture to put any strain worth mention upon it. This vow was a vow which I first made eleven years ago, on a New Year's Day, that I would never make another after-dinner speech as long as I lived. It was as good a vow then, as I ever saw; but I have broken it in sixty-four places, since, and mended it up fresh every New Year's. Seven years ago I reformed in another way; I made a vow that I would lead an upright life-meaning by that that I would never deliver another lecture. I believe I have never broken that one; I think I can be true to it always, and thus disprove the Rev. Petroleum V. Nasby's maxim that "Burglars and lecturers never reform." But this other vow has always been beyond my strength-I mean, I have always been beyond its strength. The reason is simple: it lies in the fact that the average man likes to hear himself talk, when he is not under criticism. The very man who sneers at your after-dinner speech when he reads it in next morning's paper, would have been powerfully moved to make just as poor a one himself if he had been present, with the encouraging champagne in him and the friendly uncritical faces all about...