Dear Marx,

At last I have managed to get hold of L. Blanc, and also the reason why I was never able to pin him down. Écoute plutôt — ce petit grand-seigneur littéraire ne reçoit que les jeudis! et encore l’après-midi seulement! He had never let me know this, neither directly nor through his porter. Naturally, there were a crowd of asses with him, among others Ramon de la Sagra, who gave me a brochure, enclosed herewith. I have not yet read it. In the end, however, I was able to speak with him for a couple of minutes about our affair. Hesitantly, he admitted he had not yet had the time to read your book… je l’ai feuilleté et j’ai vu que M. Proudhon y est assez vivement attaqué… Eh bien, I asked, alors, serez-vous en mesure de faire l’article pour la Réforme que vous m’aviez promis? — Un article, ah mon Dieu, non, je suis si obsédé par mes éditeurs — mais voilà ce qu’il faut faire: faites l’article vous-même et je le ferai passer à la Réforme. That was then agreed. Au fond, you lose nothing by it. At least I will present our views more accurately than he would have done. I shall place them directly in parallel with his own — that is the utmost that can be got through; one obviously cannot draw the conclusion against the Réf. in the Réf. itself. I shall do it straight away.

Why did you not tell Bornstedt to stop writing to the Réf. about your story? My article was ready when Bornstedt’s appeared in the Réf. together with the Chartist stories; I had waited for their reprint in order to take it along. It was considerably longer than the brief notice, in which, on top of that, your name was distorted. I told Flocon to alter the misprint; yesterday he didn’t do it, and today I haven’t seen the Réf. That, too, matters little. When your speech appears, send me 4–5 copies at once for the Réf., L. Bl., de la Sagra (for the Démocratie pacifique), etc. I can now make a longer article out of it, since the notice was so disgracefully short.

As for L. Bl., he deserves to be chastised. Write a critique of his Revol. for the Deutsche Brüsseler Ztg and show him in practice how far we stand above him; friendly in form, but firmly insisting on our superiority in content. On lui fera parvenir cela. One must make the little sultan somewhat fearful. || The theoretical side is, alas, for the time being our only force, but that counts for a good deal with these lance-breakers for la science sociale, for the loi de la production suffisante, etc. Heaven knows how these fellows are with their hunt for this unknown loi. They want to find a law with which to multiply production tenfold. They search, like the carter in the fable, for the Hercules who is to haul the social cart out of the mire for them. The Hercules lies in their own arms. The loi de la production suffisante consists in producing suffisamment. If they cannot do that […] no magic spell will help them. The patent-taking inventors do more for production suffisante than the whole L. Blanc with his profound, high-flown striving after la science.

I had written B[ernay]s a very ironic letter in reply to his last and lamented that his impartiality robbed me of my last consolation — that of being a misunderstood beautiful soul — à la Praslin. With a sorrowful gaze heavenwards he sent this note back to me, and remarked that hereby our correspondence had reached its end. Sela.

Nothing else new. Write soon.

Yours

Paris, Friday evening. | To Herr Karl Marx at the German Workers’ Society Brussels. |