The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Mark Twain [good summer reads .TXT] 📗

and by, one eyelid began to droop occasionally; then everybody stepped out of the room, excepting Gerhardt and myself, and I moved to the rear, where I would be out of sight and not be a disturbing element.

Harrison, the general’s old colored body servant, came in presently, and remained awhile, watching Gerhardt, and then broke out, with great zeal and decision:

“That’s the general! Yes, sir, that’s the general! Mind! I tell you that’s the general!”

Then he went away and the place became absolutely silent.

Within a few minutes afterward the general was sleeping, and for two hours he continued to sleep tranquilly, the serenity of his face disturbed only at intervals by a passing wave of pain. It was the first sleep he had had for several weeks uninduced by narcotics.

To my mind this bust, completed at this sitting, has in it more of General Grant than can be found in any other likeness of him that has ever been made since he was a famous man. I think it may rightly be called the best portrait of General Grant that is in existence. It has also a feature which must always be a remembrancer to this nation of what the general was passing through during the long weeks of that spring. For into the clay image went the pain which he was enduring, but which did not appear in his face when he was awake. Consequently, the bust has about it a suggestion of patient and brave and manly suffering which is infinitely touching.

At the end of two hours General Badeau entered abruptly and spoke to the general, and this woke him up. But for this interruption he might have slept as much longer, possibly.

Gerhardt worked on as long as it was light enough to work, and then he went away. He was to come again, and did come the following day; but at the last moment Col. Fred Grant would not permit another sitting. He said that the face was so nearly perfect that he was afraid to allow it to be touched again, lest some of the excellence might be refined out of it, instead of adding more excellence to it. He called attention to an oil painting on the wall downstairs and asked if we knew that man. We couldn’t name him⁠—had never seen his face before. “Well,” said Colonel Grant, “that was a perfect portrait of my father once. It was given up by all the family to be the best that had ever been made of him. We were entirely satisfied with it, but the artist, unhappily, was not; he wanted ‘to do a stroke or two to make it absolutely perfect’ and he insisted on taking it back with him. After he had made those finishing touches it didn’t resemble my father or anyone else. We took it, and have always kept it as a curiosity. But with that lesson behind us we will save this bust from a similar fate.”

He allowed Gerhardt to work at the hair, however; he said he might expend as much of his talent on that as he pleased, but must stop there.

Gerhardt finished the hair to his satisfaction, but never touched the face again. Colonel Grant required Gerhardt to promise that he would take every pains with the clay bust, and then return it to him, to keep, as soon as he had taken a mold from it. This was done.

Gerhardt prepared the clay as well as he could for permanent preservation and gave it to Colonel Grant.

Up to the present day, May 22, 1885, no later likeness of General Grant, of any kind, has been made from life, and if it shall chance to remain the last ever made of him from life, coming generations can properly be grateful that one so nearly perfect of him was made after the world learned his name.

The Reverend Doctor N⁠⸺ Visits General Grant

Dictated 1885

July 4, 1885.⁠—General Grant is still living this morning. Many a person between the two oceans lay hours awake last night listening for the booming of the fire bells which should speak to a nation in simultaneous voice and tell it its calamity. The bell strokes are to be thirty seconds apart and there will be sixty-three⁠—the general’s age. They will be striking in every town in the United States at the same moment⁠—the first time in the world’s history that the bells of a nation have tolled in unison⁠—beginning at the same moment and ending at the same moment.

More than once, during two weeks, the nation stood watching with bated breath, expecting the news of General Grant’s death.

The family, in their distress, desired spiritual help, and one Reverend Doctor N⁠⸺ was sent for to furnish it. N⁠⸺ had lately gone to California, where he had got a ten-thousand-dollar job to preach a funeral sermon over the son of an ex-governor, a millionaire; and a most remarkable sermon it was⁠—and worth the money. If N⁠⸺ got the facts right, neither he nor anybody else⁠—any ordinary human being⁠—was worthy to preach that youth’s funeral sermon, and it was manifest that one of the disciples ought to have been imported into California for the occasion. N⁠⸺ came on from California at once and began his ministration at the general’s bedside; and, if one might trust his daily reports, the general had conceived a new and perfect interest in spiritual things. It is fair to presume that the most of N⁠⸺’s daily reports originated in his own imagination.

Col. Fred Grant told me that his father was, in this matter, what he was in all matters and at all times⁠—that is to say, perfectly willing to have family prayers going on, or anything else that could be satisfactory to anybody, or increase anybody’s comfort in any way; but he also said that, while his father was a good man, and indeed as good as any man, Christian or otherwise, he was not a praying man.

Some of the speeches