27 July 1871
Dear Kugelmann,
Be so good as to send the enclosed note to Liebknecht immediately.
I find your silence most strange. I cannot assume that the various postal deliveries of printed matter have not reached you.
On the other hand, it would be very foolish if you – after the old eye for eye, tooth for tooth – were seeking to punish me in this way for my not writing. Consider, my dear, that if the day had 48 hours, I should still not have finished my day’s work for months past.
The work for the International is immense, and then London is overrun with refugees. Besides the refugees, for whom we have to provide. Moreover, I am overwhelmed by other persons, newspaper fellows and others of every sort, who come to see the “monster” with their own eyes.
Hitherto it has been believed that the formation of Christian myths under the Roman Empire was only possible because printing had not yet been invented. Precisely the reverse. The daily press and the telegraph, which disperses its fabrications in an instant over the whole face of the earth, manufacture more myths (and the bourgeois mind believes and spreads them) in one day than could formerly have been produced in a century.
My daughters have been in the Pyrenees for months. Little Jenny, who was still suffering from the after-effects of pleurisy, is recovering visibly, as she writes to me.
Many thanks for your Germanic communications.
I hope that you, as well as your dear wife and little Fränzchen – to whom I send my cordial greetings – are in good health.
By the way. You were probably surprised that in my missive to the “Pall Mall” I made duelling allusions. The matter was quite simply this. If I had not given the editor this handle to crack a few cheap jokes, he would simply have suppressed the whole thing. As it was, he walked into the trap and fulfilled my real purpose – he printed, word for word, the accusations against Jules Favre & Co. from the Address.
Salut.
Your K. M.