Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

PARIS 9 i

Heine was extremely sensitive to any sort of criticism. Sometimes he

arrived at the Marxes literally in tears because an obscure writer had

attacked him in a journal. Marx's best tactic then was to address him

to his wife whose kindness and wit soon brought the despairing poet

to reason.^111

Heine also had the distinction of saving the life of the Marxes' first baby:

he arrived one day to find the child having convulsions and both parents

at their wits' end; he immediately prescribed a hot bath, prepared it

himself, and bathed the baby, who at once recovered.

Marx also spent a lot of his time in the company of Russian aristocratic

emigres who, he said later, 'feted' him throughout his stay.^112 These

included his later adversary Bakunin with whom Marx seems to have been

on friendly terms. The same cannot be said of the Polish Count Cieszkow-

ski, author of a seminal book at the beginning of the Young Hegelian

movement, of whom Marx later recalled that 'he so bored me that I

wouldn't and couldn't look at anything that he later perpetrated'.^113 Marx

naturally passed much of his time with French socialists - such as Louis

Blanc, and particularly Proudhon (also a subsequent adversary) whose

unique brand of anarcho-socialism had already made him the most promi-

nent left-wing thinker in Paris. Marx later claimed that he was responsible

for teaching Proudhon about German idealism: 'In long discussions that

often last the whole night, I injected him with large doses of Hegelianism;

this was, moreover, to his great disadvantage as he did not know German

and could not study the matter in depth.'^114 The most that can be said is

that Marx shared this distinction with Bakunin.^115

III. THE 'PARIS MANUSCRIPTS'

Marx thrived in this perfervid intellectual atmosphere. However much
Ruge might disapprove of what he considered Marx's disorderly life,
cynicism and arrogance, he could not but admire his capacity for hard
work.

He reads a lot. He works in an extrordinarily intense way. He has a

critical talent that degenerates sometimes into something which is

simply a dialectical game, but he never finishes anything - he interrupts

every bit of research to plunge into a fresh ocean of books.. .. He is

more excited and violent than ever, especially when his work has made

him ill and he has not been to bed for three or even four nights on

end.^116

Marx intended to continue his critique of Hegel's politics, then he