Letter to Laura Lafargue, August 8, 1885

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 8 August 1885


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, Second Russian Edition, Vol. 36, Moscow, 1964
Reproduced from the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 47


ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE

IN PARIS

London, 8 August 1885

My dear Laura,

To my astonishment I find that in all copies[1] I can lay my hands on, the index has been omitted in the binding. I have at once written to Meissner for explanations and shall send you a copy as soon as received.

It is quite right that you should go to see Mother Vaillant at Viller- ville but that is no reason why you should not see us. We intend leav- ing here on Tuesday 11th, and shall be back September 11th at lat- est. 421 Schorlemmer will leave about same time for Germany and return via Paris about middle of September, and we cannot see any reason why you should not then come over with him. If Paul cannot go to Bordeaux now, he may manage to go then and so everything would be for the best.[2]

Your letter reminds me that indeed Deville's publisher can stop the translation for one year after publication of the original. 435 But that year has passed, as it is now two years since I had the manuscript at Eastbourne,[3] after which time it was brought out almost immediate- ly. The man who is to bring out the translation is William Reeves, 185 Fleet St., but we cannot either procure a copy or hear anything more about it.

Tussy and Edward were to leave yesterday for Deal, but I have not yet had a note from them with their address. They intend staying from 10-14 days. The Kautskys have gone to Eastbourne. The mother Kautsky is a singularly unaffected woman for a German au- thoress. I have read one of her novels,[4] it is not at all bad. However I advised her to study Balzac and she has taken a few volumes, but will her French be up to that sort of reading?

The scrutin de liste3 7 5 is no doubt at first against our people, but that does not matter so long as our people are not more numerous. If they succeed in making a decent show in Paris and some great pro- vincial centres, there will be a necessity for the Radicals next time to make a combined list with them in some places, and then some may get in; besides by that time, they will be a good deal stronger, and a good many of the outside sects, Possibilists,[5] etc., will be broken up. If this next electionc brings Clemenceau into office, I shall be quite satisfied. He is the last man, as far as I can see, that the bour- geoisie has to put forward. After him le déluge. 4 3 6 And at the same time the elections here with an entirely new electorate 2 " which must be the beginning of the end; and old William[6] on his last legs (he fell upstairs again yesterday at Gastein) —we shall see what we shall see.

After the elections here — which will, I hope, carry all the Potters, Cremers and other faux frères[7] into Parliament — the basis for a so- cialist movement here will become broader and firmer. And therefore I am glad to see that Hyndmanite movement will not take serious roots anywhere and that the simple, clumsy, wonderfully blundering, but sincere movement of the Socialist League 346 is slowly and appar- ently surely gaining ground. Justice is of an increasing vacuousness, and To-Day is dying, if not dead.

Good-bye — I have to write a heap of letters yet — love from all of us.

Yours affectionately,

F. Engels

  1. ↑ of the second volume of Capital
  2. ↑ Paul Lafargue was planning to visit his mother in Bordeaux.
  3. ↑ See this volume, p. 46.
  4. ↑ M. Kautsky, Stefan vom Grillenhof. See this volume, p. 330.
  5. ↑ Possibilists—followers of a reformist trend in the French socialist movement be tween the 1880s and the beginning of the 20th century. It was led by Paul Louis Marie Brousse and Benoît Malon who caused a split in the French Workers' Party in 1882 by forming their own party called the Workers' Social-Revolutionary Party (see Note 201). Its ideological basis was the theory of municipal socialism. The Possibilists proclaimed the 'policy of possibilities' to be their principle; at the beginning of the 20th century they became part of the French Socialist Party.
  6. ↑ William I
  7. ↑ false brothers