67a. Therese Forster to Georgine Heyne in Göttingen: Vilnius, Lithuania, 26 March 1786 [*]
Vilnius, 26 March 1786
. . . Caroline Böhmer wrote me an extremely tragic letter; she is not happy, her husband is morally not enough for her, and she is resolved to become a martyr. [1] She wants to fool me into believing she came down with nervous fever out of anxiety for me. Which makes me very sorry, for whenever people go to such lengths to try to assure me, I have difficulty believing. Her virtues cost her enormous effort — have Assad [2] give you a sample of his imprecations on virtues that cost that much effort. . .
Notes
[*] Source: Therese Huber Briefe, 1:218. Back.
[1] The letter seems not to be extant; possibly the letter Caroline mentions in her letter to Lotte Michaelis on 28 May 1786 (letter 70).
Nowhere at least in extant letters does Caroline complain about her marriage or husband as implied here, though such does certainly not preclude the possibility. On the other hand, neither are her references to her marriage particularly ebullent; see her remark in her letter to Lotte Michaelis on 13 September 1784 (letter 48) about how Franz Böhmer had “nattered on about the ‘bliss of the heart’ and that sort of thing, probably all of it understood as just the opposite.” Caroline is similarly surprisingly reserved about her feelings when Böhmer died in February 1788.
Not surprisingly, the topos of the unhappy marriage was, especially given the circumstances under which most bourgeois women married, a not uncommon one in literature at the time (“Reue” [Remorse, regret], Goettinger Taschen Kalender vom Jahr 1789; Inhaltsverzeichnis deutscher Almanache, Theodor Springmann Stiftung):
[2] Therese and Georg Forster’s nickname for Friedrich Ludwig Wilhelm Meyer. Back.
Translation © 2011 Doug Stott