35

Engels to Marie Engels  
in Mannheim  

[Bremen] 18 Sept. 1840  

My dearest!

At this moment the equinoctial storm is raging in a fearful manner: a window was blown in in our house last night, and the trees are crashing most pitifully. Tomorrow and the day after, reports of wrecked ships will be coming in! The Old Man! is standing at the window, pulling a wry face, for the day before yesterday a ship put to sea in which he has 3,000 thalers’ worth of linen, and it is not insured. You write nothing about the letter to Ida which I enclosed with my previous letter, or did I forget to put it in? – I am now definitely staying here until Easter, which suits me extremely ill for various reasons. So Ida is gone now; that will be very distressing for you.

We too have a fine camp here, nearly 3,000 strong, troops from Oldenburg, Bremen, Lübeck and Hamburg. I was there the other day; it was an enormous joke. Right at the front in the tent (a pub-keeper had erected a big dining-tent) sat a Frenchman, who was quite tight and could no longer stand on his legs. The waiters hung a large wreath round him, and then he started bellowing: “Crowned wif leaves the dear full beaker!” Afterwards they dragged him to the mortuary, i.e. the hayloft, where he stayed lying and slept. When he was sober again, he borrowed a horse from someone else, sat on it and galloped up and down the camp without stopping. He was always on the verge of falling off in the pleasantest manner. We enjoyed an enormous amount of fun there, and particularly good wine. Last Sunday I rode to Vegesack, on which excursion I had the pleasure of being soaked through by rain four times, and yet I had so much inner heat in me that I always quickly became dry again. But I also had an abominable horse which trotted fearfully hard, so that the infernal jolting went through marrow and bone. – Just now another 6 bottles of beer are being hauled in for us, and these are to pass immediately into the inflammation process—I thought of cigars, it should read the evacuation process. – I have already nearly dispatched one bottle and smoked a cigar along with it; directly our Don Guillermo, the young principal, is going out again, and then we begin anew.

19 Sept. 1840. You lead a more boring life than we do, after all. Yesterday afternoon there was no more work to be done, and the Old Man was away, and Wilhelm L[eupold] was also rarely seen. So I lit a cigar, first wrote the above to you, then took Lenau’s Faust from the desk and read in it. Afterwards I drank another bottle of beer and at half past seven went to Roth’s; we bowled in the Union, I read Raumer’s History of the Hohenstaufen, and then ate a beefsteak with cucumber salad. At half past ten I went home, read Diez’s Grammar of the Romance Languages until I became sleepy. Besides, tomorrow is Sunday again and Wednesday is the Bremen day of prayer and repentance, and so you gradually potter along until winter sets in. This winter I shall take dancing lessons with Eberlein so as to accustom my stiff legs to a little grace.

Here you have a scene from the Schlachte, i.e. the street that has the Weser on one side and where the goods are unloaded. The fellow with the whip is the carter, who is just about to drive away the coffee sacks that lie behind; the fellow with the sack on the right is the Schlachtkaper, who is loading them; next to him stands a cooper who has just drawn a sample and still holds it in his hand, and beside him the lighterman, from whose barge the sacks were loaded. You cannot deny that these figures are very interesting. When the carter drives, he sits on the horse without saddle, stirrups or spurs and keeps digging his heels into its ribs, thus:

Now it’s raining again quite improperly for a Saturday evening; it really ought to rain only during the week, but from Saturday noon on it should be fine. Do you know what superfine medium-good ordinary Domingo coffee is? That is another one of those profound concepts that occur in the philosophy of the merchant class, and which your mental powers are incapable of grasping. Superfine medium-good ordinary Domingo coffee is coffee from the island of Haiti, which has a slight tinge of green colour, but is otherwise grey, and where you get, in the purchase of ten good beans, four bad beans, six little stones, and a quarter of a loth of dirt, dust, etc., thrown in. Now you have grasped it, I suppose. At present the pound costs 9 groten, which is 4 silver groschen and 8 pfennigs. I really ought not to divulge such trade secrets, since one ought not to blab out of school; but because it’s you, I’ll make an exception. – Just now our workman says: “Herr Derkhiem, if you make yourself common with the lads, you must get yourself a bit more respect, else you’ll get the people right under your feet. Heinrich is a bad lad, I’ve had many a trick with him. You shouldn’t play about with them so much, you must give them a clip round the ears right away, else it’s no use. And if you go to the Old Man, he does nothing to the lads either, he just says: Get the fellow off my back.” So there you can practise your Low German a little. For the rest, I am your most devoted

Friedrich  
Bremen, 19 September 1840