10 - Coal-smoke and Englishmen

Summary

When a copy of the Athenaeum swam into Heine's ken early in 1848, it held a surprise for him; for in that copy, dated 4 December 1847, he read an announcement of his own death. He was much amused, he told his mother, that while German papers declared him all but deceased, English journals were saying ‘I was altogether dead, and regretting my demise’ (19 January 1848). What he, could not tell his mother was that his paralysis had given him the immobility of death without its peace, but this sad decline of his body, and the constant pains which reminded him that there was still life left in it, could not impair his imagination, his power over words, or his wit.

The year that saw the final collapse of his health also saw the toppling of the July Monarchy in France. ‘Poor Louis Philippe,’ he wrote to the Augsburg Gazette on 3 March 1848, after telling a symbolic anecdote about a boy who brought his grandmother a pot of confitures ‘liberated’ from one of the royal residences, ‘poor Louis Philippe, forced to wander off again at such an advanced age! And to cold, foggy England at that, where the confitures of exile taste twice as bitter as anywhere else!’ ‘Depressing England’ (‘das traurige England’), he calls the country a few days later; and when, on 10 March 1848, he tries to give readers of the Augsburg Gazette some idea of Louis Philippe's virtuous life-style, he seeks a comparison farther north in the British isles: ‘In habits and morals he was as chaste as a Scottish country clergyman.’