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8 MARRIAGE AND CAREER FRIENDS AND ENEMIES What is really going on is transmitted in private letters and confidential communications,written and oral, but never recorded in archives. —Otto von Bismarck, 22 February 1871 The mutual relations of the two sexes seem to us to be at least as important as the mutual relations of any two governments in the world. —Thomas Babington Macaulay,“Sir William Temple,” 1838 The letters Emil du Bois-Reymond sent to Jeannette Claude during his year of engagement excelled in tone, description, and subject. In this he matched the skill of his contemporaries, for whom correspondence was an indispensable refinement. What distinguished du Bois-Reymond’s writing to his fiancée was its introspection:he wanted to show Jeannette the workings of his self. Du Bois-Reymond’s letters discussed four main topics: travel, work, home, and what might be termed “other,” a rubric that comprised people, culture, and values.The travel writing held closest to convention. Goethe, Grillparzer, and Heine all left accounts of voyages to Italy, and du Bois-Reymond’s narrative reads much like theirs, more a diary of experiences than a portrait of a country.1 His chronicle began with his departure from Ireland.After visiting the RoundTower and White Park in Antrim, he stopped off in London, where he lunched with Tyndall, arranged Henry Bence Jones’ apparatus, and shipped half his clothes to Berlin. He then joined Bence Jones in Folkestone, spending a few days in his friend’s seaside villa before crossing to France. Paris now struck him as small and unimpressive, a city crammed with soldiers and priests and unsavory inhabitants.“Between the populations of London and Paris is a telling difference: there a vigorous, healthy people in the bloom of power 140 CHAPTER 8 and wealth, here one perishing in the most vulgar mess of hedonism and vanity and idle fraud.” His departure from the capital only amplified his disapproval. Since the French “couldn’t manage their railways,” he was forced to travel by means of the“insane arrangement” of a diligence placed atop a flatbed car. Halfway to Switzerland the train halted and the coach drove away “on its own four wheels.” The passengers were so cramped that du Bois-Reymond spent the journey sitting like “the image of an Egyptian deity.” Bad weather and illness completed his misery.2 Things improved after he joined Splittgerber in Geneva at the Hôtel des Bergues. His letters from Aix-les-Bains, Chambéry, and other alpine towns were picturesque; unlike his literary predecessors, however, he regarded Italy more as a foil than as an attraction. He liked Turin’s wide and regular streets, which reminded him of Hamburg; far less agreeable was Naples, which was hot, rank, vulgar, and crowded. His mood lifted at the sight of Charles Martins, his Parisian advocate.The French naturalist happened to be vacationing with his wife and daughter, and before long he and du BoisReymond , much like Goethe and Tischbein, used their acquaintance as an excuse to climb the volcano. Both scientists spurned guides, marveling at the view before paying a visit to the meteorological station, where du Bois-Reymond was delighted to find that the director had studied his book.“It is indeed pleasant to be certain of a decent reception by scholars everywhere from the north of England to Vesuvius.”3 Science, nature, art, and religion set the order of precedence in du Bois-Reymond’s correspondence from Italy. Stung by Jeannette’s criticism that his descriptions weren’t interesting, he labored to improve his style. Beautiful images followed excursions to Capri, Ischia, Sorrento, Paestum, and Pompeii, a cameo from Pozzuoli being typical: The dark blue sea, the green-brown hills, the shining sky, the burning sun, the white houses with flat roofs and monstrous barren spaces inside, the streets narrow, dirty, filled with the noise of business, craft, trade, and family life. Everything takes place outside: naked children, pigs and chickens between barrels of the most amazing sea creatures, some of which I recognized from specimen jars in the anatomical museum and saw alive and wriggling for the first time; and then the splendid costumes, the shrill speech, the violent gestures, the occasional figure of loveliness, though not a single beautiful face: the whole muddle makes up such a strange world that one is inclined to consider whether one has remained the same.4 Throughout his letters, du Bois-Reymond styled himself an aesthete, castigating Verdi for excess...

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