KARL MARX

LONDON
he gave Louise Freyberger the right to reveal the truth should he be
accused of treating his 'son' shabbily. He even told the story to a distraught
Eleanor on his deathbed, writing it on a slate as he had lost his
voice. The secret was confined to the (Marx) family and one or two
friends. The son was immediately sent to foster parents and had no
contact at all with the Marx household, though he resumed contact with
his mother after Marx's death. Louise Freyberger wrote:
He came regularly every week to visit her; curiously enough, however,
he never came in through the front door but always through the
kitchen, and only when I came to General and he continued his visits,
did I make sure that he had all the rights of a visitor ...
For Marx separation from his wife, who was terribly jealous, was
always before his eyes: he did not love the boy; he did not dare to do
anything for him, the scandal would have been too great; he was sent
as paying guest to a Mrs Louis (I think that is how she writes her
name) and he took his name too from his foster-mother, and only after
Nimm's 146 death adopted the name of Demuth. 147
There is no doubt of the general credibility of this letter. The certificate
of Frederick Demuth's birth in June 1851 is conserved in Somerset
House; the space for the name of the father is left blank; the name of
the mother is given as Helene Demuth and the place of birth as 28 Dean
Street. Although so few details of this episode survive, it seems that the
necessity of preserving appearances and the fear of the inevitable rumours
only served to increase the strain on Jenny's nerves. Five weeks after the
birth, and the day following its registration, Marx wrote to Weydemeyer
concerning 'the unspeakable infamies that my enemies are spreading about
me' and continued: '... my wife is ill, and she has to endure the most
unpleasant bourgeois poverty from morning to night. Her nervous system
is undermined, and she gets none the better because every day some
idiotic talebearers bring her all the vaporings of the democratic cesspools.
The tactlessness of these people is sometimes colossal." 48
Marx described himself as having 'a hard nature'; 149 and Jenny wrote
of him in 1850: 'he has never, even at the most terrible moments, lost
his confidence in the future or his cheerful good humour'. 1S0 But his
correspondence with Engels shows that he did not always accept his
troubles with so much serenity. In 1852 he wrote: 'When I see the
sufferings of my wife and my own powerlessness I could rush into
the devil's jaws." si And two years later: 'I became wild from time to time
that there is no end to the muck.' 152 One undated letter from Jenny to
Marx in Manchester gives a glimpse of the state of mind to which she
was sometimes reduced: 'Meanwhile I sit here and go to pieces. Karl, it