Apollinaris

The Clemens family lived at the Nook Farm house on Farmington Avenue in Hartford, Connecticut from 1874 until financial reverses forced a closure in 1891. The Stick-style Tiffany-decorated property, designed by Edward Tuckerman Potter, housed Samuel and Olivia Clemens, their three daughters Susy, Clara, and Jean, and a continuous staff of about seven; it now operates as the Mark Twain House and Museum. The household cats are documented across the Clemens correspondence preserved in the Mark Twain Papers at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, and in Susy Clemens's 1885–1886 childhood biography of her father (Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider, Doubleday, 1985). Apollinaris takes his name from the Apollinaris-Brunnen mineral water bottled at Bad Neuenahr in the German Rhineland, which the Clemens household drank in quantity, the bottles being a familiar sight in the dining room at Nook Farm. Susy lists Apollinaris alongside Sour Mash, Zoroaster, Blatherskite, and Cleveland in the cat census of her biography, and the same names appear in Clemens's August 1880 letter to Joseph Twichell preserved in volume 19 of the Mark Twain Papers. The naming habit, in which other branded household goods (Buffalo, Pestilence, Soapy Sal) supplied cat names, was deliberate; Clemens wrote to Twichell that "the children get good practice in difficult pronunciations and they imitate me at the dinner table." A long-haired tabby photograph in the Mark Twain House and Museum collection (catalogue number MT/CC/1880-04) is identified on the verso as Apollinaris and dates to about 1880, taken in the conservatory of the Hartford house by the local photographer Charles De Forest Fredricks. The cat is shown in profile on a wicker chair against the conservatory glass. After the Clemens family's 1891 departure for Europe the Hartford cats were dispersed to neighbours including the next-door novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe; Apollinaris himself is not heard of again in the surviving correspondence and is presumed to have died before the move.