936 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
for 'disturbing the peace of the night with drunken noise'^53 - though
only for twenty-four hours; and the university 'prison' was far from
uncomfortable as the friends of the condemned man had the right to
come and help him pass the time with beer and cards. During 1836
rivalry broke out in the university between the students from Trier and
the young Prussian aristocrats in the Borussia-Korps. Sometimes it
degenerated into open fighting and in August 1836 Marx was wounded
above the left eye in a duel. He was also denounced to the university
authorities for having 'been in the possession of forbidden weapons in
Cologne',^54 but the investigation petered out.
When not drinking and duelling, Marx spent most of his time writing
poetry and joined a club of like-minded students. The club probably had
political overtones: one of its members was Karl Grtin, one of the future
founders of 'true' socialism; it was under police surveillance, and had
contacts with other university poetry clubs that were similarly suspect. In
his rare letters home Marx was in the habit of enclosing specimens of his
compositions which his father found quite incomprehensible. On being
asked to bear the cost of their publication, he warned his son that
'although I am very pleased with your poetical gifts and have great hopes
of them, I would be very sorry to see you cut in public the figure of a
minor poet'.^55 Well before the end of the academic year Heinrich Marx
decided that one year at Bonn was quite enough and that his son should
transfer to the University of Berlin.
Before Marx set out for Berlin, however, another problem arose:
'Scarcely was the wild rampaging in Bonn finished,' Heinrich Marx wrote
to him during the summer vacation of 1836 , 'scarcely were your debts
paid - and they were really of the most varied nature - when to our
dismay the sorrows of love appeared.'^56 Jenny and Karl had been friends
from earliest childhood. Jenny, with her dark auburn hair and green eyes,
was widely noticed in Trier and had even been chosen as Queen of the
Ball. The young Marx, who later described himself as 'a really furious
Roland',^57 was an insistent suitor: there had been an understanding
between them before Marx left for Bonn and in the summer of 1836 this
was turned into a formal engagement. By the standards of the time, the
engagement was an extremely unusual one: Marx was only eighteen, Jenny
was four years older, and there was also a certain difference in social
status. At first only Marx's parents, and his sister Sophie - who had acted
as go-between for the lovers - were let into the secret. Jenny's father
gave his consent in March 1837. Marx's parents were not (initially at
least) very keen on the match; and the pair had also to sustain 'years of
unnecessary and exhausting conflicts'^58 with Jenny's family. Marx later
denied vehemently his son-in-law's statement in a newspaper that the