Karl Marx by Francis Wheen Read Free Book Online Page B

suicide pact. Eleanor duly wrote a tender note of farewell and swallowed the prussic acid which he provided. Aveling, needless to say, never intended to keep his side of the bargain: as soon as she had taken the lethal dose he left the house. Though not charged with murder, he undoubtedly killed her.
    Laura and Paul Lafargue lived outside Paris, mostly on the money they had sponged from Engels. In November 1911, when he was sixty-nine and she sixty-six, they decided that there was nothing left to live for and committed suicide together. The main speaker at their joint funeral was a representative of the Russian communists, one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who said that the ideas of Laura’s father would be triumphantly realised sooner than anyone guessed.
    Four of Marx’s children predeceased him, and the two survivors both killed themselves. The only member of the family to escape the curse was Freddy Demuth, who lived and worked quietly in east London. He died of cardiac failure on 28 January 1929, aged seventy-seven. To the end, neither he nor anyone else suspected that Freddy might be a son of the man whose face and name were, by then, known throughout the world.

POSTSCRIPT 2 :

Confessions
    All three Marx daughters loved the Victorian parlour game ‘Confessions’ – nowadays often known as the Proust Questionnaire – and in the mid-1860s invited their father to submit himself to interrogation. Here are his answers:
    Your favourite virtue:
Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man:
Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman:
Weakness
Your chief characteristic:
Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness:
To fight
Your idea of misery:
Submission
The vice you excuse most:
Gullibility
The vice you detest most:
Servility
Your aversion:
Martin Tupper
[popular Victorian author]
Favourite occupation:
Book-worming
Favourite poet:
Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer:
Diderot
Favourite hero:
Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine:
Gretchen
Favourite flower:
Daphne
Favourite colour:
Red
Favourite name:
Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish:
Fish
Favourite maxim:
Nihil humani a me alienum puto
[Nothing human is alien to me]
Favourite motto:
De omnibus dubitandum
[Everything should be doubted]

POSTSCRIPT 3 :

Regicide
    During his visit to Germany in 1867, while waiting for the proof-sheets of Capital , Karl Marx attended a party given by the chess master Gustav R. L. Neumann. A record survives of one game he played that night, against a man called Meyer.

Index
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    Aberdare, Lord 332–3
    Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 86–7
    Anneke, Friedrich 134–6
    Annenkov, Pavel 103, 105
    Arnim, Bettina von 50
    ‘A Short Sketch of an Eventful Life’ (J. Marx) 174–5
    Aveling, Edward B. 367–8, 385–6
    Avineri, Professor Shlomo 276–7, 367
    Babeuf, Gracchus 98
    Bachmann, Dr Carl Friedrich 33
    Bakunin, Michael 64, 67, 314–20, 324–5, 332, 338–43, 345–7
    Bartels, Adolphe 270–1
    Barthélemy, Emmanuel 165
    Bauer, Bruno 27, 31–2, 34–5, 40, 56–7, 86, 94, 112
    Bauer, Edgar 75, 86, 256–7
    Bauer, Heinrich 98
    Bauer, Louis 153
    Bax, Ernest Belfort 372–3
    Becker, Hermann 137
    Berlin, Isaiah 366–7
    Bernays, Karl Ludwig 67
    Bleak House (Dickens) 149–51
    Blind, Karl 238–9
    Blos, Wilhelm 46
    Börnstein, Henrich 67
    Brandenburg, Count 141
    Burns, Lydia 261–2, 349
    Burns, Mary 12, 81, 261–5
    Capital (Marx) 155
    birth of 166, 188–9, 227, 254–5, 259, 287, 289–90, 294–5
    criticised 299–312
    Darwin’s opinion of 363–9
    dedication 267, 365–9
    Engels influence on 82–3, 267
    English translations of 369–70, 385
    influence of English economists upon 304
    influence of literary fiction upon 304–11
    KM finishes Volume One 298–9
    plagiarised 371–2
    Theories of Surplus Value 308–10
    Volume II & III published 385
    Carr, E. H.