Letters of Marx and Engels, 1849
Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 201;
Written: 13 July 1849;
First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.
Dear Weydemeyer,
Dronke will already have written to tell you that you must sell the red newspapers at any price.[262]
I am here with my family, sans le sou.[263] And yet an opportunity has come my way of making 3,000-4,000 fr. in a few weeks. For my pamphlet against Proudhon, [The Poverty of Philosophy] which he has done everything in his power to suppress, is beginning to sell here, and it is up to me to infiltrate reviews of it into the more important papers, thus necessitating a second edition. But for this to be of any help I would have to buy up the copies still available in Brussels and Paris in order to become sole propriétaire.
300-400 talers would enable me to carry out this operation and at the same time maintain myself here during the early days. You might, perhaps, be able to help me in this.
Namely, as follows:
A lady in Rheda — Lüning is also in touch with her — sent 1,000 talers to Carl Post for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, but recovered the money when that paper went under. Might she not, perhaps, be persuaded by your intervention to make me this advance? My claim to such an advance is, I believe, all the greater as I contributed more than 7,000 talers to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung which, after all, was a party enterprise.
If at all possible, pursue this matter, but without mentioning it to anybody. I tell you that, unless help is forthcoming from one quarter or another, I shall be lost since my family is also here and the last piece of my wife’s jewellery has already found its way to the pawnbrokers.
I await your reply by return.
Your
K. Marx