“I cannot give my dear wife all that is needful to make life pleasant, and the education, also, of my children is, from a financial point of view, not what I wish it to be.”
To make life pleasant! Education of the children! You would think he wished to take a box at the opera for his wife, and send his children to a boarding school in Geneva. Mind you, it was late in the year, and pretty cold . . . well, he lived under the tiles, without fire! When I received that letter, I did not know this, but later on I was at his place, and to this day I feel annoyed about the silly tone of his epistle. Hang it, when a man is poor, he may as well say that he is poor! There must be poor people, that is necessary in Society, and it is God’s will. If he will only not beg for alms and will trouble nobody, I have no objection whatever to his being poor; but he has no right to put all this gloss on the matter. Listen further:
“As it is my duty to provide for the needs of those belonging to me, I have decided to utilize a talent which I believe is given to me. I am a poet . . .
Pshaw! You know, reader, what I and all sensible people think about poets.
. . . “and writer. From my childhood I have expressed my emotions in verse, and also in later times I wrote down daily what passed through my soul. I imagine that among all these writings there are some articles that have a certain value, and I am looking for a publisher for these. But this is exactly the difficulty. I am unknown to the public, and publishers value a work more according to the established name of the author than according to its contents.”
Just as we do coffee according to the name of the brands. Certainly! How else?
