Even this fluent discharge of Italian did not bring the soap at once, but

there was a good reason for it. There was not such an article about the

establishment. It is my belief that there never had been. They had to

send far up town, and to several different places before they finally got

it, so they said. We had to wait twenty or thirty minutes. The same

thing had occurred the evening before, at the hotel. I think I have

divined the reason for this state of things at last. The English know

how to travel comfortably, and they carry soap with them; other

foreigners do not use the article.

At every hotel we stop at we always have to send out for soap, at the

last moment, when we are grooming ourselves for dinner, and they put it

in the bill along with the candles and other nonsense. In Marseilles

they make half the fancy toilet soap we consume in America, but the

Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they

have obtained from books of travel, just as they have acquired an

uncertain notion of clean shirts, and the peculiarities of the gorilla,

and other curious matters. This reminds me of poor Blucher's note to the

landlord in Paris:

PARIS, le 7 Juillet. Monsieur le Landlord--Sir: Pourquoi don't you

mettez some savon in your bed-chambers? Est-ce que vous pensez I

will steal it? La nuit passee you charged me pour deux chandelles

when I only had one; hier vous avez charged me avec glace when I had

none at all; tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other

on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice.

210

The Innocents Abroad