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Complete Letters of Mark Twain
The first time we called at the convent, Pere Jacopo was absent; the next (Just at this moment Miss Spaulding spoke up and said something about Pere Jacopo—there is more in this acting of one mind upon another than people think) time, he was there, and gave us preserved rose-leaves to eat, and talked about you, and Mrs. Howells, and Winnie, and brought out his photographs, and showed us a picture of “the library of your new house,” but not so – it was the study in your Cambridge house. He was very sweet and good. He called on us next day; the day after that we left Venice, after a pleasant sojourn Of 3 or 4 weeks. He expects to spend this winter in Munich and will see us often, he said.
Pretty soon, I am going to write something, and when I finish it I shall know whether to put it to itself or in the “Contributors’ Club.” That “Contributors’ Club” was a most happy idea. By the way, I think that the man who wrote the paragraph beginning at the bottom of page 643 has said a mighty sound and sensible thing. I wish his suggestion could be adopted.
It is lovely of you to keep that old pipe in such a place of honor.
While it occurs to me, I must tell you Susie’s last. She is sorely badgered with dreams; and her stock dream is that she is being eaten up by bears. She is a grave and thoughtful child, as you will remember. Last night she had the usual dream. This morning she stood apart (after telling it,) for some time, looking vacantly at the floor, and absorbed in meditation. At last she looked up, and with the pathos of one who feels he has not been dealt by with even-handed fairness, said “But Mamma, the trouble is, that I am never the bear, but always the person.”
It would not have occurred to me that there might be an advantage, even in a dream, in occasionally being the eater, instead of always the party eaten, but I easily perceived that her point was well taken.
I’m sending to Heidelberg for your letter and Winnie’s, and I do hope they haven’t been lost.
My wife and I send love to you all.
Yrs ever,
Mark.
The Howells story, running at this time in the Atlantic, and so much enjoyed by the Clemens party, was “The Lady of the Aroostook.” The suggestions made for enlarging the part of the “old man” are eminently characteristic.
Mark Twain’s forty-third birthday came in Munich, and in his letter conveying this fact to his mother we get a brief added outline of the daily life in that old Bavarian city. Certainly, it would seem to have been a quieter and more profitable existence than he had known amid the confusion of things left behind in, America.
*****
To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in America:
No. 1a Karlstrasse,
Dec. 1, Munich. 1878.
My dear mother and sister, – I broke the back of life yesterday and started down-hill toward old age. This fact has not produced any effect upon me that I can detect.
I suppose we are located here for the winter. I have a pleasant work-room a mile from here where I do my writing. The walk to and from that place gives me what exercise I need, and all I take. We staid three weeks in Venice, a week in Florence, a fortnight in Rome, and arrived here a couple of weeks ago. Livy and Miss Spaulding are studying drawing and German, and the children have a German day-governess. I cannot see but that the children speak German as well as they do English.
Susie often translates Livy’s orders to the servants. I cannot work and study German at the same time: so I have dropped the latter, and do not even read the language, except in the morning paper to get the news.
We have all pretty good health, latterly, and have seldom had to call the doctor. The children have been in the open air pretty constantly for months now. In Venice they were on the water in the gondola most of the time, and were great friends with our gondolier; and in Rome and Florence they had long daily tramps, for Rosa is a famous hand to smell out the sights of a strange place. Here they wander less extensively.
The family all join in love to you all and to Orion and Mollie.
Affly,
Your son,
Sam.
XIX. Letters 1879. Return To America. The Great Grant Reunion
Life went on very well in Munich. Each day the family fell more in love with Fräulein Dahlweiner and her house.
Mark Twain, however, did not settle down to his work readily. His “pleasant work-room” provided exercise, but no inspiration. When he discovered he could not find his Swiss note-book he was ready to give up his travel-writing altogether. In the letter that follows we find him much less enthusiastic concerning his own performances than over the story by Howells, which he was following in the Atlantic.
The “detective” chapter mentioned in this letter was not included in ‘A Tramp Abroad.’ It was published separately, as ‘The Stolen White Elephant’ in a volume bearing that title. The play, which he had now found “dreadfully witless and flat,” was no other than “Simon Wheeler, Detective,” which he had once regarded so highly. The “Stewart” referred to was the millionaire merchant, A. T. Stewart, whose body was stolen in the expectation of reward.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Munich, Jan. 21, (1879)
My dear Howells, – It’s no use, your letter miscarried in some way and is lost. The consul has made a thorough search and says he has not been able to trace it. It is unaccountable, for all the letters I did not want arrived without a single grateful failure. Well, I have read-up, now, as far as you have got, that is, to where there’s a storm at sea approaching, – and we three think you are clear, out-Howellsing Howells. If your literature has not struck perfection now we are not able to see what is lacking. It is all such truth – truth to the life; every where your pen falls it leaves a photograph. I did imagine that everything had been said about life at sea that could be said, but no matter, it was all a failure and lies, nothing but lies with a thin varnish of fact, – only you have stated it as it absolutely is. And only you see people and their ways, and their insides and outsides as they are, and make them talk as they do talk. I think you are the very greatest artist in these tremendous mysteries that ever lived. There doesn’t seem to be anything that can be concealed from your awful all-seeing eye. It must be a cheerful thing for one to live with you and be aware that you are going up and down in him like another conscience all the time. Possibly you will not be a fully accepted classic until you have been dead a hundred years, – it is the fate of the Shakespeares and of all genuine prophets, – but then your books will be as common as Bibles, I believe. You’re not a weed, but an oak; not a summer-house, but a cathedral. In that day I shall still be in the Cyclopedias, too, thus: “Mark Twain; history and occupation unknown – but he was personally acquainted with Howells.” There – I could sing your praises all day, and feel and believe every bit of it.
My book is half finished; I wish to heaven it was done. I have given up writing a detective novel – can’t write a novel, for I lack the faculty; but when the detectives were nosing around after Stewart’s loud remains, I threw a chapter into my present book in which I have very extravagantly burlesqued the detective business – if it is possible to burlesque that business extravagantly. You know I was going to send you that detective play, so that you could re-write it. Well I didn’t do it because I couldn’t find a single idea in it that could be useful to you. It was dreadfully witless and flat. I knew it would sadden you and unfit you for work.
I have always been sorry we threw up that play embodying Orion which you began. It was a mistake to do that. Do keep that Ms and tackle it again. It will work out all right; you will see. I don’t believe that that character exists in literature in so well-developed a condition as it exists in Orion’s person. Now won’t you put Orion in a story? Then he will go handsomely into a play afterwards. How deliciously you could paint him – it would make fascinating reading – the sort that makes a reader laugh and cry at the same time, for Orion is as good and ridiculous a soul as ever was.
Ah, to think of Bayard Taylor! It is too sad to talk about. I was so glad there was not a single sting and so many good praiseful words in the Atlantic’s criticism of Deukalion.
Love to you all,
Yrs Ever,
Mark.
We remain here till middle of March.
In ‘A Tramp Abroad’ there is an incident in which the author describes himself as hunting for a lost sock in the dark, in a vast hotel bedroom at Heilbronn. The account of the real incident, as written to Twichell, seems even more amusing.
The “Yarn About the Limburger Cheese and the Box of Guns,” like “The Stolen White Elephant,” did not find place in the travel-book, but was published in the same volume with the elephant story, added to the rambling notes of “An Idle Excursion.”
With the discovery of the Swiss note-book, work with Mark Twain was going better. His letter reflects his enthusiasm.
*****
To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
Munich, Jan 26 ’79.
Dear old Joe, – Sunday. Your delicious letter arrived exactly at the right time. It was laid by my plate as I was finishing breakfast at 12 noon. Livy and Clara, (Spaulding) arrived from church 5 minutes later; I took a pipe and spread myself out on the sofa, and Livy sat by and read, and I warmed to that butcher the moment he began to swear. There is more than one way of praying, and I like the butcher’s way because the petitioner is so apt to be in earnest. I was peculiarly alive to his performance just at this time, for another reason, to wit: Last night I awoke at 3 this morning, and after raging to my self for 2 interminable hours, I gave it up. I rose, assumed a catlike stealthiness, to keep from waking Livy, and proceeded to dress in the pitch dark. Slowly but surely I got on garment after garment – all down to one sock; I had one slipper on and the other in my hand. Well, on my hands and knees I crept softly around, pawing and feeling and scooping along the carpet, and among chair-legs for that missing sock; I kept that up; and still kept it up and kept it up. At first I only said to myself, “Blame that sock,” but that soon ceased to answer; my expletives grew steadily stronger and stronger, – and at last, when I found I was lost, I had to sit flat down on the floor and take hold of something to keep from lifting the roof off with the profane explosion that was trying to get out of me. I could see the dim blur of the window, but of course it was in the wrong place and could give me no information as to where I was. But I had one comfort – I had not waked Livy; I believed I could find that sock in silence if the night lasted long enough. So I started again and softly pawed all over the place, – and sure enough at the end of half an hour I laid my hand on the missing article. I rose joyfully up and butted the wash-bowl and pitcher off the stand and simply raised – so to speak. Livy screamed, then said, “Who is that? what is the matter?” I said “There ain’t anything the matter – I’m hunting for my sock.” She said, “Are you hunting for it with a club?”
I went in the parlor and lit the lamp, and gradually the fury subsided and the ridiculous features of the thing began to suggest themselves. So I lay on the sofa, with note-book and pencil, and transferred the adventure to our big room in the hotel at Heilbronn, and got it on paper a good deal to my satisfaction.
I found the Swiss note-book, some time ago. When it was first lost I was glad of it, for I was getting an idea that I had lost my faculty of writing sketches of travel; therefore the loss of that note-book would render the writing of this one simply impossible, and let me gracefully out; I was about to write to Bliss and propose some other book, when the confounded thing turned up, and down went my heart into my boots. But there was now no excuse, so I went solidly to work – tore up a great part of the Ms written in Heidelberg, – wrote and tore up, – continued to write and tear up, – and at last, reward of patient and noble persistence, my pen got the old swing again!
Since then I’m glad Providence knew better what to do with the Swiss note-book than I did, for I like my work, now, exceedingly, and often turn out over 30 Ms pages a day and then quit sorry that Heaven makes the days so short.
One of my discouragements had been the belief that my interest in this tour had been so slender that I couldn’t gouge matter enough out of it to make a book. What a mistake. I’ve got 900 pages written (not a word in it about the sea voyage) yet I stepped my foot out of Heidelberg for the first time yesterday, – and then only to take our party of four on our first pedestrian tour – to Heilbronn. I’ve got them dressed elaborately in walking costume – knapsacks, canteens, field-glasses, leather leggings, patent walking shoes, muslin folds around their hats, with long tails hanging down behind, sun umbrellas, and Alpenstocks. They go all the way to Wimpfen by rail-thence to Heilbronn in a chance vegetable cart drawn by a donkey and a cow; I shall fetch them home on a raft; and if other people shall perceive that that was no pedestrian excursion, they themselves shall not be conscious of it. – This trip will take 100 pages or more, – oh, goodness knows how many! for the mood is everything, not the material, and I already seem to see 300 pages rising before me on that trip. Then, I propose to leave Heidelberg for good. Don’t you see, the book (1800 Ms pages,) may really be finished before I ever get to Switzerland?
But there’s one thing; I want to tell Frank Bliss and his father to be charitable toward me in, – that is, let me tear up all the Ms I want to, and give me time to write more. I shan’t waste the time – I haven’t the slightest desire to loaf, but a consuming desire to work, ever since I got back my swing. And you see this book is either going to be compared with the Innocents Abroad, or contrasted with it, to my disadvantage. I think I can make a book that will be no dead corpse of a thing and I mean to do my level best to accomplish that.
My crude plans are crystalizing. As the thing stands now, I went to Europe for three purposes. The first you know, and must keep secret, even from the Blisses; the second is to study Art; and the third to acquire a critical knowledge of the German language. My Ms already shows that the two latter objects are accomplished. It shows that I am moving about as an Artist and a Philologist, and unaware that there is any immodesty in assuming these titles. Having three definite objects has had the effect of seeming to enlarge my domain and give me the freedom of a loose costume. It is three strings to my bow, too.
Well, your butcher is magnificent. He won’t stay out of my mind. – I keep trying to think of some way of getting your account of him into my book without his being offended – and yet confound him there isn’t anything you have said which he would see any offense in, – I’m only thinking of his friends – they are the parties who busy themselves with seeing things for people. But I’m bound to have him in. I’m putting in the yarn about the Limburger cheese and the box of guns, too – mighty glad Howells declined it. It seems to gather richness and flavor with age. I have very nearly killed several companies with that narrative, – the American Artists Club, here, for instance, and Smith and wife and Miss Griffith (they were here in this house a week or two.) I’ve got other chapters that pretty nearly destroyed the same parties, too.
O, Switzerland! the further it recedes into the enriching haze of time, the more intolerably delicious the charm of it and the cheer of it and the glory and majesty and solemnity and pathos of it grow. Those mountains had a soul; they thought; they spoke, – one couldn’t hear it with the ears of the body, but what a voice it was! – and how real. Deep down in my memory it is sounding yet. Alp calleth unto Alp! – that stately old Scriptural wording is the right one for God’s Alps and God’s ocean. How puny we were in that awful presence – and how painless it was to be so; how fitting and right it seemed, and how stingless was the sense of our unspeakable insignificance. And Lord how pervading were the repose and peace and blessedness that poured out of the heart of the invisible Great Spirit of the Mountains.
Now what is it? There are mountains and mountains and mountains in this world – but only these take you by the heart-strings. I wonder what the secret of it is. Well, time and time again it has seemed to me that I must drop everything and flee to Switzerland once more. It is a longing – a deep, strong, tugging longing – that is the word. We must go again, Joe. – October days, let us get up at dawn and breakfast at the tower. I should like that first rate.
Livy and all of us send deluges of love to you and Harmony and all the children. I dreamed last night that I woke up in the library at home and your children were frolicing around me and Julia was sitting in my lap; you and Harmony and both families of Warners had finished their welcomes and were filing out through the conservatory door, wrecking Patrick’s flower pots with their dress skirts as they went. Peace and plenty abide with you all!
Mark.
I want the Blisses to know their part of this letter, if possible. They will see that my delay was not from choice.
Following the life of Mark Twain, whether through his letters or along the sequence of detailed occurrence, we are never more than a little while, or a little distance, from his brother Orion. In one form or another Orion is ever present, his inquiries, his proposals, his suggestions, his plans for improving his own fortunes, command our attention. He was one of the most human creatures that ever lived; indeed, his humanity excluded every form of artificiality – everything that needs to be acquired. Talented, trusting, child-like, carried away by the impulse of the moment, despite a keen sense of humor he was never able to see that his latest plan or project was not bound to succeed. Mark Twain loved him, pitied him – also enjoyed him, especially with Howells. Orion’s new plan to lecture in the interest of religion found its way to Munich, with the following result:
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Munich, Feb. 9. (1879)
My dear Howells, – I have just received this letter from Orion – take care of it, for it is worth preserving. I got as far as 9 pages in my answer to it, when Mrs. Clemens shut down on it, and said it was cruel, and made me send the money and simply wish his lecture success. I said I couldn’t lose my 9 pages – so she said send them to you. But I will acknowledge that I thought I was writing a very kind letter.
Now just look at this letter of Orion’s. Did you ever see the grotesquely absurd and the heart-breakingly pathetic more closely joined together? Mrs. Clemens said “Raise his monthly pension.” So I wrote to Perkins to raise it a trifle.
Now only think of it! He still has 100 pages to write on his lecture, yet in one inking of his pen he has already swooped around the United States and invested the result!
You must put him in a book or a play right away. You are the only man capable of doing it. You might die at any moment, and your very greatest work would be lost to the world. I could write Orion’s simple biography, and make it effective, too, by merely stating the bald facts – and this I will do if he dies before I do; but you must put him into romance. This was the understanding you and I had the day I sailed.
Observe Orion’s career – that is, a little of it:
1. He has belonged to as many as five different religious denominations; last March he withdrew from the deaconship in a Congregational Church and the Superintendency of its Sunday School, in a speech in which he said that for many months (it runs in my mind that he said 13 years,) he had been a confirmed infidel, and so felt it to be his duty to retire from the flock.
2. After being a republican for years, he wanted me to buy him a democratic newspaper. A few days before the Presidential election, he came out in a speech and publicly went over to the democrats; he prudently “hedged” by voting for 6 state republicans, also.
The new convert was made one of the secretaries of the democratic meeting, and placed in the list of speakers. He wrote me jubilantly of what a ten-strike he was going to make with that speech. All right – but think of his innocent and pathetic candor in writing me something like this, a week later:
“I was more diffident than I had expected to be, and this was increased by the silence with which I was received when I came forward; so I seemed unable to get the fire into my speech which I had calculated upon, and presently they began to get up and go out; and in a few minutes they all rose up and went away.”
How could a man uncover such a sore as that and show it to another? Not a word of complaint, you see – only a patient, sad surprise.
3. His next project was to write a burlesque upon Paradise Lost.
4. Then, learning that the Times was paying Harte $100 a column for stories, he concluded to write some for the same price. I read his first one and persuaded him not to write any more.
5. Then he read proof on the N. Y. Eve. Post at $10 a week and meekly observed that the foreman swore at him and ordered him around “like a steamboat mate.”
6. Being discharged from that post, he wanted to try agriculture – was sure he could make a fortune out of a chicken farm. I gave him $900 and he went to a ten-house village a miles above Keokuk on the river bank – this place was a railway station. He soon asked for money to buy a horse and light wagon, – because the trains did not run at church time on Sunday and his wife found it rather far to walk.
For a long time I answered demands for “loans” and by next mail always received his check for the interest due me to date. In the most guileless way he let it leak out that he did not underestimate the value of his custom to me, since it was not likely that any other customer of mine paid his interest quarterly, and this enabled me to use my capital twice in 6 months instead of only once. But alas, when the debt at last reached $1800 or $2500 (I have forgotten which) the interest ate too formidably into his borrowings, and so he quietly ceased to pay it or speak of it. At the end of two years I found that the chicken farm had long ago been abandoned, and he had moved into Keokuk. Later in one of his casual moments, he observed that there was no money in fattening a chicken on 65 cents worth of corn and then selling it for 50.
7. Finally, if I would lend him $500 a year for two years, (this was 4 or 5 years ago,) he knew he could make a success as a lawyer, and would prove it. This is the pension which we have just increased to $600. The first year his legal business brought him $5. It also brought him an unremunerative case where some villains were trying to chouse some negro orphans out of $700. He still has this case. He has waggled it around through various courts and made some booming speeches on it. The negro children have grown up and married off, now, I believe, and their litigated town-lot has been dug up and carted off by somebody – but Orion still infests the courts with his documents and makes the welkin ring with his venerable case. The second year, he didn’t make anything. The third he made $6, and I made Bliss put a case in his hands – about half an hour’s work. Orion charged $50 for it – Bliss paid him $15. Thus four or five years of slaving has brought him $26, but this will doubtless be increased when he gets done lecturing and buys that “law library.” Meantime his office rent has been $60 a year, and he has stuck to that lair day by day as patiently as a spider.
8. Then he by and by conceived the idea of lecturing around America as “Mark Twain’s Brother”—that to be on the bills. Subject of proposed lecture, “On the Formation of Character.”
9. I protested, and he got on his warpaint, couched his lance, and ran a bold tilt against total abstinence and the Red Ribbon fanatics. It raised a fine row among the virtuous Keokukians.
10. I wrote to encourage him in his good work, but I had let a mail intervene; so by the time my letter reached him he was already winning laurels as a Red Ribbon Howler.
11. Afterward he took a rabid part in a prayer-meeting epidemic; dropped that to travesty Jules Verne; dropped that, in the middle of the last chapter, last March, to digest the matter of an infidel book which he proposed to write; and now he comes to the surface to rescue our “noble and beautiful religion” from the sacrilegious talons of Bob Ingersoll.
Now come! Don’t fool away this treasure which Providence has laid at your feet, but take it up and use it. One can let his imagination run riot in portraying Orion, for there is nothing so extravagant as to be out of character with him.
Well-good-bye, and a short life and a merry one be yours. Poor old Methusaleh, how did he manage to stand it so long?
Yrs ever,
Mark.
*****
To Orion Clemens Unsent and inclosed with the foregoing, to W. D. Howells:
Munich, Feb. 9, (1879)
My dear Bro., – Yours has just arrived. I enclose a draft on Hartford for $25. You will have abandoned the project you wanted it for, by the time it arrives, – but no matter, apply it to your newer and present project, whatever it is. You see I have an ineradicable faith in your unsteadfastness, – but mind you, I didn’t invent that faith, you conferred it on me yourself. But fire away, fire away! I don’t see why a changeable man shouldn’t get as much enjoyment out of his changes, and transformations and transfigurations as a steadfast man gets out of standing still and pegging at the same old monotonous thing all the time. That is to say, I don’t see why a kaleidoscope shouldn’t enjoy itself as much as a telescope, nor a grindstone have as good a time as a whetstone, nor a barometer as good a time as a yardstick. I don’t feel like girding at you any more about fickleness of purpose, because I recognize and realize at last that it is incurable; but before I learned to accept this truth, each new weekly project of yours possessed the power of throwing me into the most exhausting and helpless convulsions of profanity. But fire away, now! Your magic has lost its might. I am able to view your inspirations dispassionately and judicially, now, and say “This one or that one or the other one is not up to your average flight, or is above it, or below it.”
And so, without passion, or prejudice, or bias of any kind, I sit in judgment upon your lecture project, and say it was up to your average, it was indeed above it, for it had possibilities in it, and even practical ones. While I was not sorry you abandoned it, I should not be sorry if you had stuck to it and given it a trial. But on the whole you did the wise thing to lay it aside, I think, because a lecture is a most easy thing to fail in; and at your time of life, and in your own town, such a failure would make a deep and cruel wound in your heart and in your pride. It was decidedly unwise in you to think for a moment of coming before a community who knew you, with such a course of lectures; because Keokuk is not unaware that you have been a Swedenborgian, a Presbyterian, a Congregationalist, and a Methodist (on probation), and that just a year ago you were an infidel. If Keokuk had gone to your lecture course, it would have gone to be amused, not instructed, for when a man is known to have no settled convictions of his own he can’t convince other people. They would have gone to be amused and that would have been a deep humiliation to you. It could have been safe for you to appear only where you were unknown – then many of your hearers would think you were in earnest. And they would be right. You are in earnest while your convictions are new. But taking it by and large, you probably did best to discard that project altogether. But I leave you to judge of that, for you are the worst judge I know of.
(Unfinished.)
That Mark Twain in many ways was hardly less child-like than his brother is now and again revealed in his letters. He was of steadfast purpose, and he possessed the driving power which Orion Clemens lacked; but the importance to him of some of the smaller matters of life, as shown in a letter like the following, bespeaks a certain simplicity of nature which he never outgrew:
*****
To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
Munich, Feb. 24. (1879)
Dear old Joe, – It was a mighty good letter, Joe – and that idea of yours is a rattling good one. But I have not sot down here to answer your letter, – for it is down at my study, – but only to impart some information.
For a months I had not shaved without crying. I’d spend 3/4 of an hour whetting away on my hand – no use, couldn’t get an edge. Tried a razor strop-same result. So I sat down and put in an hour thinking out the mystery. Then it seemed plain – to wit: my hand can’t give a razor an edge, it can only smooth and refine an edge that has already been given. I judge that a razor fresh from the hone is this shape V – the long point being the continuation of the edge – and that after much use the shape is this V – the attenuated edge all worn off and gone. By George I knew that was the explanation. And I knew that a freshly honed and freshly strapped razor won’t cut, but after strapping on the hand as a final operation, it will cut. – So I sent out for an oil-stone; none to be had, but messenger brought back a little piece of rock the size of a Safety-match box – (it was bought in a shoemaker’s shop) bad flaw in middle of it, too, but I put 4 drops of fine Olive oil on it, picked out the razor Mark.d “Thursday” because it was never any account and would be no loss if I spoiled it – gave it a brisk and reckless honing for 10 minutes, then tried it on a hair – it wouldn’t cut. Then I trotted it through a vigorous 20-minute course on a razor-strap and tried it on a hair-it wouldn’t cut – tried it on my face – it made me cry – gave it a 5-minute stropping on my hand, and my land, what an edge she had! We thought we knew what sharp razors were when we were tramping in Switzerland, but it was a mistake – they were dull beside this old Thursday razor of mine – which I mean to name Thursday October Christian, in gratitude. I took my whetstone, and in 20 minutes I put two more of my razors in splendid condition – but I leave them in the box – I never use any but Thursday O. C., and shan’t till its edge is gone – and then I’ll know how to restore it without any delay.
