167 

[Manchester,] 1 May 1851 

Dear Marx, 

Within a few days, a week at the most, you will receive another 
£5—TId have sent it today, had I not just had to pay out £10 in 
cash. 

For the past few days I have been vainly searching for the 
letters from Lupus* and Dronke. You must have taken them both 
with you.*' If you find them, send them to me by return and I 
shall then write at once. Nor have I been able to find Fischer’s 
letter from New Orleans. 

Ne nous plaignons pas trop de la mauvaise queue. I happen to have 
Savary’s memoirs‘ at home. Heaven knows, Napoleon was 
similarly afflicted. Savary himself providing a splendid example. 
Nothing could be more mediocre than this fellow. Just as some 
people think they’re up ro THE mark, yet don’t even understand the 
Communist Manifesto," so too Savary imagines that he’s got the 
measure of Napoleon, that he’s one of the few elect who can 
comprehend the full greatness of the fellow, and yet he has failed 
to comprehend one single campaign- or battle-plan. When he 
wrote these memoirs, virtually no proper account of these 
campaigns had been written and, since the thing’s an apologia 
both for Napoleon and for himself, he would certainly not have 
failed to do his best in this respect; instead, we find nothing but a 
few general platitudes and a disconnected jumble of detail as seen 
through the eyes of a subordinate. All the fellow knows about 
Austerlitz,* for instance, is that the enemy was surprised by a 
flanking march, and was split up into as many fragments as there 
were French columns—a _ word-for-word copy of Napoleon’s 
bulletin. But how it happened, he has no idea. For the rest, a vast 
amount of Empire and Consulate tittle-tattle; a real prize crapaud,° 

a Wilhelm Wolff (see this volume, p. 333) - & Let us not complain too much about our 
poor following. - © A.-J.-M.-R. Savary, Mémoires du duc de Rovigo... - 4 K. Marx and 
F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party. - © philistine