THE LAST DECADE 4 iiadjacent room but for three weeks Marx could not visit her. Eleanor
wrote later:It was a terrible time. Our dear mother lay in the big front room,
Moor in the small room behind. And the two of them, who were so
used to one another, so close to one another, could not even be together
in the same room. Our good old Lenchen ... and I had to nurse them
both Never shall I forget the morning when he felt strong enough
to go into Mother's room. When they were together they were young
again - she a young girl and he a loving youth, both on the threshold
of life, not an old man devastated by illness and an old dying woman
parting from each other for ever.^133The unbearable pains characteristic of cancer only came in the last few
days and were treated with morphia. When she died on 2 December it
was 'a gende going to sleep, her eyes fuller, more beautiful, lighter than
ever'.^134 The last word she spoke to her husband was: Good. His doctor
forbade Marx to attend the funeral, but he comforted himself with the
fact that the day before her death, Jenny had remarked concerning funeral
ceremonies 'we are no such external people'.^135 Marx never recovered from
Jenny's death. On seeing him immediately afterwards, Engels remarked to
Kleanor that 'Moor is dead, too'. Marx could only take refuge in the
problems of his own health since 'the only effective antidote for sorrows
of the spirit is bodily pain'.^136 Meissner wrote that a third edition of
Capital, Volume One, was necessary, but Marx no longer had the heart
to work on it.
On partially recovering from his illness, Marx felt himself to be doubly
crippled, 'morally through the loss of my wife, and physically through a
thickening of the pleura'.^137 He decided to go once more to the seaside
and in January 1882 took Eleanor with him to Ventnor. His coughing
and bronchial catarrh continued unabated and Eleanor proved a poor
companion: she had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown since the
previous summer following a proposal of marriage from the Russian
Populist Leo Hartmann. She was in the throes of breaking off her engage-
ment to Lissagaray and despairing of ever having the chance to establish
herself on the stage. When her friends in London learnt of her state,
Dollie Maitland rushed to Ventnor to assist. It was not a success. Apart
from being quite unable to amuse herself alone, Dollie fed unending
gossip to Marx, who was hurt that his daughter should have turned to
others for help and anxious that she should not 'be sacrificed on the
family altar as the "companion" of an old man'.^138 Eleanor certainly got
the impression that her father did not appreciate her mental stress and
considered her to be indulging her illness at the expense of her family.