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Nor did Mark’s “geysers of profanity” cease spouting after these gay and youthful days in San Francisco. With Clemens it may truly be said that profanity was an art–a pyrotechnic art that entertained nations.

“It was my duty to keep buttons on his shirts,” recalled Katy Leary, life-long housekeeper and friend in the Clemens menage, “and he’d swear something terrible if I didn’t. If he found a shirt in his drawer without a button on, he’d take every single shirt out of that drawer and throw them right out of the window, rain or shine–out of the bathroom window they’d go. I used to look out every morning to see the snowflakes–anything white. Out they’d fly…. Oh! he’d swear at anything when he was on a rampage. He’d swear at his razor if it didn’t cut right, and Mrs. Clemens used to send me around to the bathroom door sometimes to knock and ask him what was the matter. Well, I’d go and knock; I’d say, ‘Mrs. Clemens wants to know what’s the matter.’ And then he’d say to me (kind of low) in a whisper like, ‘Did she hear me Katy?’ ‘Yes,’ I’d say, ‘every word.’ Oh, well, he was ashamed then, he was afraid of getting scolded for swearing like that, because Mrs. Clemens hated swearing.” But his swearing never seemed really bad to Katy Leary, “It was sort of funny, and a part of him, somehow,” she said. “Sort of amusing it was–and gay–not like real swearing, ’cause he swore like an angel.”

In his later years at Stormfield Mark loved to play his favorite billiards. “It was sometimes a wonderful and fearsome thing to watch Mr. Clemens play billiards,” relates Elizabeth Wallace. “He loved the game, and he loved to win, but he occasionally made a very bad stroke, and then the varied, picturesque, and unorthodox vocabulary, acquired in his more youthful years, was the only thing that gave him comfort. Gently, slowly, with no profane inflexions of voice, but irresistibly as though they had the headwaters of the Mississippi for their source, came this stream of unholy adjectives and choice expletives.”

Mark’s vocabulary ran the whole gamut of life itself. In Paris, in his appearance in 1879 before the Stomach Club, a jolly lot of gay wags, Mark’s address, reports Paine, “obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs of the world, though no line of it, not even its title, has ever found its way into published literature.” It is rumored to have been called “Some Remarks on the Science of Onanism.”

In Berlin, Mark asked Henry W. Fisher to accompany him on an exploration of the Berlin Royal Library, where the librarian, having learned that Clemens had been the Kaiser’s guest at dinner, opened the secret treasure chests for the famous visitor. One of these guarded treasures was a volume of grossly indecent verses by Voltaire, addressed to Frederick the Great. “Too much is enough,” Mark is reported to have said, when Fisher translated some of the verses, “I would blush to remember any of these stanzas except to tell Krafft-Ebing about them when I get to Vienna.” When Fisher had finished copying a verse for him Mark put it into his pocket, saying, “Livy [Mark’s wife, Olivia] is so busy mispronouncing German these days she can’t even attempt to get at this.”

In his letters, too, Howells observed, “He had the Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling one’s self prudish; and I was often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not bear to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearean.”

“With a nigger squat on her safety-valve”
John Hay, Pike County Ballads.