To be going abroad was not the rare thing it once had been. Americans were crisscrossing the Atlantic, resolutely “doing” Europe’s galleries and monuments, hiking the Alps, taking the waters in a dozen different spas, filling the best hotels, in numbers that would have been unheard of before the war. So near and commonplace had Europe become, announced the popular travel writer Bayard Taylor, that he would write no more on the subject. It was the year of The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain’s often jeering declaration that a touch of Old World culture was neither beyond the ken of the ordinary
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