Daily Order No. 3. I order you to show me what happens in the Central Committee! Strictly confidential. Stalina, the Boss.
Augustus to Caius Caesar, 23 September AD 2
An elderly father writes to his son; an aging emperor writes to his adopted heir. Caesar Augustus (formerly Octavian) has ruled Rome since the assassination of his great-uncle Julius Caesar in 44 BC and the entire empire as its first emperor since 31. Having no sons of his own, he has adopted his nephews Caius and Lucius to succeed him at his “sentry post.” Sending Caius on an inspection trip of the Roman provinces, he finds that on his sixty-fourth birthday he is missing the “dearest little donkey.” Sadly, both boys were to die before Augustus himself.
Greetings my dear Caius my dearest little donkey whom, so help me, I constantly miss whenever you are away from me. But especially on such days as today my eyes are eager for my Caius and wherever you have been today I hope you have celebrated my sixty-fourth birthday in health and happiness…and I pray the gods that whatever time is left for me I may pass with you safe and well with our country in a flourishing condition while you both are playing the man and preparing to succeed to my sentry post.
Joseph II to his brother Leopold II, 4 October 1777
It was the royal wedding of its time—but seven years into the marriage, something is wrong, and this letter reveals what that is and how to solve it.
In 1770, when she was just fifteen, the Habsburg archduchess of Austria, Marie Antoinette married the Bourbon heir to the French throne, soon to be Louis XVI. She was pretty and playful but also silly, extravagant, and unwise. This promised to be a bad combination in an overstretched kingdom on the verge of bankruptcy, which could ill afford any loss of royal prestige. King Louis, for his part, was cloddish, ineffectual, and dull. For seven years, while Marie flirted with admirers, Louis struggled to consummate the marriage.
Finally her brother, Emperor Joseph II, comes to visit to see if he can help. In an early example of marriage counselling, Joseph interviews Louis and his sister like an imperial sex therapist. “What a pair of blunderers,” he writes afterward in this astonishing letter to his brother, the future Emperor Leopold, concluding that the real problem is not a physical or medical one but merely the queen’s lack of interest and the king’s laziness. In August the grateful couple consummated their marriage, and she was soon pregnant with the first of several children. In 1789 Louis and Marie Antoinette were overthrown and, in 1793, guillotined.
Imagine! In his marriage bed—this is the secret—he has strong, perfectly satisfactory erections. He introduces the member, stays there for perhaps two minutes without moving, withdraws without ever discharging but still erect, and bids good night. It’s incredible, because in addition he sometimes has nighttime emissions, but in his bed, never when on the job, and he’s happy, saying simply that he only does it out of duty and gets no pleasure from it. Ah! If I could have been present once, I should have arranged it properly. He needs to be whipped, to make him discharge in a passion, like donkeys. Further, my sister is pretty placid, and they’re two incompetents together.
Rameses the Great to Ḫattušili III, 1243 BC
The arrogance of empire in a letter three thousand years old. Rameses the Great ruled Egypt at its zenith, its master for around fifty years. Earlier in his reign he had fought against the Hittite king Ḫattušili, but in 1258 BC, following the Battle of Kadesh, they became allies and Rameses deigned to marry a Hittite princess. Here, taking advantage of their good relations, Ḫattušili asks Rameses if he can help with a sensitive family problem: his sister Matanazi, married to a nearby king, wants to have children even though she is no longer young, and the Hittite asks if Rameses can send priests and healers to make this happen. Here is the Great King’s patronizing and ungracious answer, sneering that not even Egyptian magic could make a woman of sixty produce children….
Thus to my Brother: (Concerning) what my Brother has written to me regarding his sister Matanazi: “May my Brother send to me a man to prepare medicines so that she may bear children.” So has my Brother written. And so (I say) to my Brother: “Look, Matanazi, the sister of my Brother, the king your Brother knows her. She is said to be 50 or even 60 years old! Look, a woman of 50 is old, to say nothing of a 60-year-old! One can’t produce medicines to enable her to bear children! Well, the Sun God and the Storm God may give a command, and the order which they give will then be carried out continually for the sister of my Brother. And I, the king your Brother, will send an expert incantation-priest and an expert doctor and they will prepare medicines to assist her to produce children.
Creation
Michelangelo to Giovanni da Pistoia, 1509
Michelangelo Buonarroti was not only a sculptor and artist but also a brilliant poet and a superb letter writer. Sometimes he sent his poems as letters—this is one of the best. He had been hired by the warrior-pope Julius II in 1508 to supervise the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome: a somewhat unorthodox choice, given that he was better known as a sculptor at the time.
Julius let Michelangelo “do as I liked”—nine main scenes that would represent God’s creation of the world and of man in Genesis. The work, which would take him until 1512, would be his most timeless achievement. Not only was his vision astonishingly ambitious, but the physical strain of actually painting the ceiling was punishing. He had to build his own scaffolding and hang upside down high above the chapel for hours on end, year after year. At one point he writes to his father: “I lead a miserable existence…not of life nor honor….I live wearied by stupendous labors and beset by a thousand anxieties…never an hour’s happiness have I had.” Out of these agonies emerges one of the greatest works of art in the human story. A year into the work’s creation, he sends this despairing verse letter to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia, detailing some of the torments that he faced.
“When the Author was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel”
I’ve already grown a goiter from this torture,
swollen up here like a cat from Lombardy
(or anywhere where the stagnant water’s poison).
My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s
pointing at heaven, my brain’s crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy’s. My brush,
above me all the time, dribbles the paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!
My haunches are grinding into my guts,
my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight,
every gesture I make is blind and aimless.
My skin hangs loose below me, my spine’s
all knotted from folding over itself,
I’m bent taut as a Syrian bow.
And because I’m like this, my thoughts
Are crazy perfidious tripe:
Anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe.
My painting is dead.
Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor.
I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to his cousin Marianne, 13 November 1777
A letter of manic and scatological exuberance from a musical genius. Brought up in Salzburg and taught music by his ambitious choirmaster father, the young Mozart toured Europe for ten years as a performing pianist and violinist. During the stress of endless touring when he was in his twenties, Mozart enjoyed a madcap friendship and probably passionate relationship with Marianne—much to his father’s disapproval. Their sexual collusion and relish in fecal humor is only too clear in their earthily hilarious letters: “I shall greet you high and nobly with pizzazz,” writes Mozart to the little cousin he called “Basle,” “and put my personal seal on your ass, I will kiss your hands and have such fun shooting off my rear-end gun, I shall embrace you with a smack and wash you down front and back, I sh
all pay all I owed you from the start and then let go a resounding fart and perhaps even drop something hard—well adieu my Angel my heart I’m waiting for you PS Shit-dibitare, shit-dibatate, the pastor of Rodempl, he licked the ass of his kitchen maid, to set a good example.”
The child prodigy was first employed by the prince-bishop of Salzburg. Then in 1781, determined to make his name, he arrived in Vienna. He thrived creatively in the musical capital of Europe, where he composed his greatest operas and symphonies. But he was only moderately appreciated by Emperor Joseph II, who finally appointed him to the rank of chamber composer. In 1782 Mozart married Constance Weber, whom he adored: they had six children. His letters to her are boyishly affectionate: “I get all excited like a child when I think about being with you again—If people could see into my heart I should almost feel ashamed. Everything is cold to me—ice-cold.—If you were here with me, maybe I would find the courtesies people are showing me more enjoyable—but as it is, it’s all so empty—adieu—my dear—I am Forever, your Mozart who loves you with his entire soul. PS.—while I was writing the last page, tear after tear fell on the paper. But I must cheer up—catch—An astonishing number of kisses are flying about—The deuce!—I see a whole crowd of them. Ha! Ha! I have just caught three—They are delicious….I kiss you millions of times.”
But nothing quite approaches the outrageous humor of the “Basle letters,” those earlier Mozartian creations, with their anarchic stream of puns, alliteration, songs, echoes, and repetitions. They are best read very fast. This one begins with an instruction from his mother to write a “sensible letter.” But that resolution did not last long….
…now write her a sensible letter for once, you can still write all that funny stuff, but be sure to tell her that you have received all the mail, so she won’t be concerned about it, and worry.
* * *
Ma très chère Nièce! Cousine! fille!
Mère, Sœur, et Épouse!
* * *
Heaven, Hell, and a thousand sacristies, Croatians, damnations, devils, and witchies, druids, cross-Battalions with no ends, by all the elements, air, water, earth, and fire, Europe, asia, affrica, and America, jesuits, Augustins, Benedictins, Capucins, Minorites, Franciscans, Dominicans, Carthusians, and dignified Holy-Crucians, Canons regular and irregular, and all hairy brutes and snitches, higgledy-piggledy castrates and bitches, asses, buffaloes, oxen, fools, nitwits, and fops! What sort of manner is this, my dear? 4 soldiers and only 3 gear?—such a Paquet no Portrait?—I was already filled with high expectations—I thought for sure—for you wrote it to me yourself not long ago that I would receive it soon, very soon. Are you perhaps doubting whether I will keep my word?—I certainly hope that you have no doubts! Well then, I beg you, do send it to me, the sooner, the better. And I hope it will portray you the way I requested, I mean in french fashion.
How I like Mannheim?—as well as one can like any place without Bääsle. Pardon my poor handwriting, the pen is already old; now I have been shitting for nearly 22 years out of the same old hole and yet it’s not torn a whit!—although I used it so often to shit—and then chewed off the muck bit by bit.
I hope, on the other hand, that you have been receiving my letters, as it so happens, one from Hohenaltheim, 2 from Mannheim, and now this one. As it so happens, this one is the third from Mannheim, but all in all it’s the 4th, as it so happens. Now I must close, as it so happens, because I am not dressed yet, and we’ll be eating soon so that afterward we can go and shit again, as it so happens. Do go on loving me as I love you, then we’ll stop loving each other….[in French] Farewell, I hope that you would already have taken some French lessons, and I wouldn’t doubt that—Listen: you would know better French than I because I certainly haven’t written a word in this language in two years. Farewell. I kiss your hands, your face, your knees and your—at any rate, all that you permit me to kiss.
I am with all my heart your very affectionate Nephew and Cousin
Wolfg. Amadé Mozart
Honoré de Balzac to Ewelina Hánska, 19 June 1836
Here is the power of the letter. Balzac, author of the Comédie Humaine novels, begins his relationship with the Polish countess Hánska without them ever having met. Daughter of a famous and rich aristocratic family, she married a landowner twenty-four years older than her and had five children by him. During the 1820s, she started to read Balzac’s novels and, in 1832, sent an anonymous letter from Poland to Paris. She is a fan and a married woman; he, a flattered and vain celebrity. After about a year they meet and begin their affair. Although Hánska’s husband discovers their letters, Balzac is able to convince him that they are just a game.
When the count died in 1841, Balzac might have believed that the path was clear for the two of them to marry, but ill health and financial worries meant that they did not wed until March 1850, just months before his own death in August. This letter from early in their relationship shows the near obsession that Balzac has with Hánska, though there is a hint that her love is burning up his creative juices. If the husband had read this letter, would he have believed it was just a game?
MY BELOVED ANGEL,
I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them. I can no longer think of nothing but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me. As for my heart, there you will always be—very much so. I have a delicious sense of you there. But my God, what is to become of me, if you have deprived me of my reason? This is a monomania which, this morning, terrifies me. I rise up every moment say to myself, “Come, I am going there!” Then I sit down again, moved by the sense of my obligations. There is a frightful conflict. This is not a life. I have never before been like that. You have devoured everything. I feel foolish and happy as soon as I let myself think of you. I whirl round in a delicious dream in which in one instant I live a thousand years. What a horrible situation! Overcome with love, feeling love in every pore, living only for love, and seeing oneself consumed by griefs, and caught in a thousand spiders’ threads. O, my darling Eva, you did not know it. I picked up your card. It is there before me, and I talked to you as if you were here. I see you, as I did yesterday, beautiful, astonishingly beautiful. Yesterday, during the whole evening, I said to myself “She is mine!” Ah! The angels are not as happy in Paradise as I was yesterday!
Pablo Picasso to Marie-Thérèse Walter, 19 July 1939
An obsessional commitment to art and love is the theme of this letter. Pablo Picasso lived for his work, and everything else in his life was subordinate to his frenzied, mutating quest for artistic expression, often inspired by his female muses. Olga Khokhlova, a Russian ballerina, was his muse-lover during his synthetic cubism period; they married, but the relationship did not last. He was forty-six and married to Olga when he spotted seventeen-year-old blonde Marie-Thérèse Walter in the street. They fell in love—though he remained married. Living between Paris and a rented French country house, he painted her many times, and she became the muse for some of his most joyous masterpieces such as Girl before a Mirror, Le Rêve, and Nude in a Black Armchair. It was a period of intense creativity that reached a climax in the year 1932 at the Château de Boisgeloup in Normandy.
In bursts of color, Marie-Thérèse appears blonde and sensuous. In 1935 she gives birth to their daughter Maya. This letter reflects in rhapsodic tones his almost carnivorous, all-consuming love for his young mistress. The “problems in Switzerland” he refers to are probably business issues occasioned by the imminent outbreak of the Second World War.
But the artist was already focusing on his next muse, Dora Maar. Walter was highly jealous of the artist’s new mistress: when the two girls met at his studio and demanded he choose one of them, he told them to fight it out—“one of my choicest moments.”
Marie-Thérèse lived on in Paris and survived the artist. Nine years after his death in 1973, she committed suicide.
My love,
I have just received your letter. I wrote several to you which you must have received by now. I love you more each day. You are everything to me. I will sacrifice everything for you, for our everlasting love. I Love you. I could never forget you my love and if I am unhappy it is because I don’t belong to you as I would have liked. My Love, my Love, my Love, but I want for you to be happy and to think only of being happy. I would give anything for that. I am having some problems in Switzerland—but all that is not important. Let them send all the tears to me if I can prevent you from shedding one. I love you. Kiss Maya our daughter and I embrace you a thousand thousand times.
Yours, Picasso.
John Keats to Fanny Brawne, 13 October 1819
Here is the ultimate celebration of all-consuming passion and doom-laden romanticism. John Keats, born in 1795, was cursed with ill health, poverty, and a desperation worthy of the outstanding Romantic poet. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was fourteen, and he felt surrounded by death on all sides.
In 1818 he meets Fanny Brawne, who becomes the love of his life, but he is too poor to get engaged to her and their love is never consummated. His agonizing obsessions with Fanny, love, and death inspired the poems “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci”—also expressed in this letter to Fanny. Soon afterward, Keats discovered that he too had tuberculosis and moved to Rome for his health, where he perished at the age of just twenty-six.
Written in History Page 7
