MARX TO ENGELS ”? 

Cannes, 5 Fuin* 1882 

Dear Frep, 

On 307TH May (pro Monte Carlo) my back last branded; on 31st May 
post-operative treatment confined me to the house; on 3rd June I was 
set free by Kunemann and left the same day. He advised me to stay in 
Cannes for a couple of days, whatever the circumstances,??3 this be- 
ing essential if only to allow the wounds inflicted on me to ‘dry out’. 

Thus I have spent an entire month vegetating in this repaire of aris- 
tocratic idlers or adventurers. Nature superb, in other respects 
a dreary hole; it is ‘monumental’ because consisting solely of hotels; 
no plebeian ‘masses’ here, apart from the gargons d’hotels, de café, etc., 
and domestiques,, who belong to the Lumpenproletariat. The old rob- 
ber’s lair on its rocky promontory surrounded on 3 sides by the bay, 
i.e. Monaco, was at least an ancient, crumbling, medieval sort of 
Italian townlet; on the other hand, Condamine, built for the most part 
low down by the sea, between the ‘town’ of Monaco and the maison de 
jeu’ (i.e.Monte Carlo), and growing fast. Monaco is, 1N THE STRICT SENSE, 

4 June-> haunt-° waiters in hotels and cafés etc., and servants-¢ gaming estab- 
lishment 

the ‘polity’, the ‘state’, the ‘government’; Condamine is common- 
or-garden ‘petty-bourgeois’ society; but Monte Carlo is ‘rue preasure’, 
AND, THANKS TO THE banque de jeu,* THE FINANCIAL BASIS OF THE WHOLE TRINITY. 
Odd that these Grimaldis should have turned out to be what they 
have always been; formerly, they lived off piracy and one of them,” 
F.1.,° wrote to Lorenzo dei Medici saying their territory was very re- 
stricted and, moreover, barren; hence Nature had pointed the way to 
buccaneering; it would therefore be magnanimous on Lorenzo’s part, 
since they did not ‘venture’ to hunt down Florentine vessels, if he 
were to guarantee them an annual ‘gratuity’. Consequently Lorenzo 
paid them a small annual fee.— After the Hoty allowance’s ?°° victory 
over Napoleon, Talleyrand, who, for his own diversion, had selected 
from amongst the émigrés that arch-blackguard, the ex-tyrant of 
Monaco,‘ to be one of the companions — Talleyrand, then, thought it 
amusing to ‘restore’ him, the father of ‘Florestan’,* ‘au nom du principe 
de le légitimité ‘ The restoration of these 2 men, this couple-— him of 
Hesse-Cassel* and him of Monaco — is worthy ofa place in a new edi- 
tion of Plutarch’; at the same time, what a contrast between the Ger- 
man ‘patriarch’ and the Genoese (his main preoccupation, financial 
loot)! 

A grievance nursed in private by our Dr Kunemann is that, when 
already functioning as physician in ordinary to His Most Serene 
Highness, the present Charles III (blind as a bat), he (Kunemann) 
became unacceptable as a result of his liberal principles and had to 
make way for an Englishman (Dr Pickering). Tue survivat or THE 
Best —i.e. as a little duodecimo tyrant’s physician in ordinary — *to 
a Britisher, of course, warranted by the nature of the beast! And that 
is the worst; this same Dr Pickering, before being called by natural se- 
fection, he had dangerously fallen ill at Monaco, was treated and 
cured by* Dr Kunemann. There are many such piteous dramas of 
destiny in this world of ours! 

Oddly enough, this hot weather has made my bronchial cough 
worse rather than better. All the greater ‘pretext’, of course, for 
catching cold! Kunemann, by the by, (and the fellow’s a first-rate 
doctor, familiar with English, German and French medical litera- 
ture, a specialist in diseases of the chest and lungs) is not of your 

* casino- Lamberto Grimaldi-° for instance-¢ Honoré IV Grimaldi-* Flore- 
stan I[- in the name of the principle of legitimacy -& Elector William I-" Plutarch, 
Vitae parallelae. 

opinion regarding my journey back to Paris. I ought not, he says, to 
make it by easy stages; the weather is now hot and not only during 
the day, the nights, too, being warm. The most likely place to catch 
cold now, he avers, is at railway stations and the more often I break 
the journey, the greater the probability of rechutes*; rather, I ought, 
while in Cannes, to equip myself for the journey with 2 bottles of good 
old claret. Like Dr Stephann, he bases his view on the grounds that, 
in the treatment of pleurisy like that of bronchitis, etc., the stomach 
should be treated as the basis; eat well and amply even if it goes 
against the grain, and ‘accustom’ oneself to so doing; ‘drink’ ‘decent 
stuff and go for drives, etc., to distract oneself, if not allowed to walk, 
climb, etc., much; think as little as possible, etc. 

So, having followed these ‘directions’, J am well on the way to 
‘idiocy’, and for all that have not rid myself of the bronchial catarrh. 

A consoling thought for me is that it was bronchitis that sent old 
Garibaldi to his ‘eternal rest’.2?+ Of course, at a CERTAIN AGE it be- 
comes completely inpirrerent how one may be ‘LAUNCHED INTO ETERNITY’. 

I have been here since 3 June,” and shall be leaving this evening. In 
Nice and, on this occasion likewise in Cannes, where it is exceptional, 
a strong (if warm) wind and eddies of dust. Nature, too, can evince a cer- 
tain philistine humour (after the manner, already humorously anti- 
cipated in the Old Testament, of the serpent feeding on dust, cf. the 
dusty diet of Darwin’s worms 32°), Similarly, there is a vein of natural 
wit that runs all through the Riviera’s local press. On 24 May, for in- 
stance, there was a terrible orage, notably at Menton; lightning struck 
close auprés de la gare‘ (of Menton) and tore the sole off a passing phi- 
listine’s shoe while leaving the rest of the philistine intact. 

With love to all. 

Op Moor 

I shall not {let] friends know about my presence in Paris until Pve 
been there a few days. It is still necessary for me to have as little ‘in- 
tercourse with people’ #?° as possible. I shall have a good doctor to 
consult in the person of Dr Dourlen.