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dead in the rooms of Mary S. Wilson, described by the New York Times as “a woman of the worst character.” Apparently George “Charcoal” Botts, a charcoal peddler who paid for her lodgings and company, did not take kindly to the presence of Halstead in Wilson’s bedroom. Albert wrote colorful accounts of the courtroom scenes and even obtained an interview with the condemned man a few days before his execution. “It was a kind of reporting that was new in those days, especially in Newark, and made a decided hit in this city,” a writer for the Newark Advertiser recalled.

In February 1873, Albert moved to the New York Herald. Started by James Gordon Bennett in 1835, the Herald was in a different class from the Sun. It had pioneered the use of many modern reporting methods, such as telegraphing news and dispatching an army of correspondents to the far-flung reaches of the globe. Its in-depth reporting on finances, politics, and society, mixed with a healthy dose of crime and scandal, gave the Herald a huge circulation. Its large circulation was accompanied by heft. Unlike the Sun, the Herald was taken seriously.

The fit was a good one for the tall, rosy-cheeked, twenty-one-year-old Albert, although his writing style was considerably different from that of his colleagues. “Everybody on the Herald admitted that Albert Pulitzer’s style was rather florid,” said an editor. “He was saturated with Dumas, Balzac, and other French writers and could ‘pile on agony’ in a court scene to an extent to which not another man about the place would have ventured.”

After the brotherly reunion, Joseph sailed for Europe. It was the second time he had gone abroad since arriving in the United States in 1864. In Paris, he met up with Henry Watterson, one of the Quadrilateral editors who had worked behind the scenes of the Liberal Republican convention. The two spent a day wandering through Montmartre, a popular drinking and entertainment quartier. They arrived at a theater (a “hole-in-the-wall” said Watterson) where Les Brigands was playing. The three-act opera by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, set to music by Jacques Offenbach, provided a theatrical revenge for the French, who had lost the Franco-Prussian war two years earlier. Parisians erupted in wild applause when the heroine, Joan the Maid, sent the beer-guzzling Teuton chieftain sprawling onto the sawdust-covered floor.

As Pulitzer and Watterson walked away from the entertainment, Pulitzer said, “We are brigands, differing according to individual character, to race and pursuit. If I were writing that play, I should represent the villain as a tyrannous city editor, meanly executing the orders of a niggardly proprietor.”

“And the heroine?” asked Watterson.

“She should be a beautiful and rich young lady who buys the newspaper and marries the cub—rescuing genius from poverty and persecution,” Pulitzer replied.

In the fall, Pulitzer drifted back to St. Louis. On November 13, 1873, his friends there put on a grand celebration to mark his return. The event, held at the Southern Hotel, was so elaborate that it included a printed menu “in Commemoration of his Evacuation of Europe and Re-Invasion of St. Louis” featuring a cartoon showing a towering, skinny Pulitzer holding a top hat and looking over a crowd that included recognizable caricatures of Grosvenor, Hutchins, Johnson, and other friends.

With plates filled with salmon, lobster, venison (with jelly sauce), croquettes of chicken à l’anglaise, beef, turkey, duck, and quail, the group toasted Pulitzer with Ike Cook’s Imperial Champagne, bottled locally by the American Wine Company. Johnson led off the tributes and was followed by Hutchins and Grosvenor. Though he may have been without a defined place in the St. Louis establishment, this night Pulitzer was surrounded by the many successful friends he had made since he was a cub reporter on the Westliche Post six years earlier. Tellingly, neither Schurz nor Preetorius attended.

Pulitzer resumed his on-again, off-again study of law in the building where he had rented a room before his trip.