in Le Perreux  
London, 25 Sept. 1890

My dear Laura,

Today, your birthday, will, as is fitting, be celebrated with a good bottle of wine and a toast to your health, coupled with musical honours—and what musical honours! Nim, Schorlemmer and I, three distinguished musicians!

Many thanks for the pears, which Nim awaits with the greatest longing. That “brown fellow” of yours will be finished off before he realises where he is; as for the rest, Nim will certainly see to it that you

Thy curriculum vitae: begun and concluded in—the holy registers of the Santa Casa!

Today the last number of the “Sozialdemokrat” is published. I shall miss this paper almost as much as the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”. Ede will stay here; Tauscher departed yesterday for Stuttgart; Fischer, the best in the group after Ede, will settle in Berlin; nobody knows what to do with the unspeakable muddlehead Motteler and his genteelly bred missus, so I suppose they will stay on here for a while yet, although we could very well dispense with them—only, unfortunately, everyone else seems to feel exactly the same.

Bebel and Liebknecht have now both moved to Berlin. In case you need to get in touch with them urgently, I give you Bebel’s address, the only one I have:

A[ugust] B[ebel], Großgörschenstr. 22a, Berlin.

Pretty scoundrels among the nobility in Berlin—one shot himself in a quarrel with a ballet rat, another because of debts and...