Letter from Lou Andreas-Salomé to Freud, October 10, 1930

[Göttingen, soon after 10 October 1930]

Dear Professor Freud,

After I had written to Anna at the Grundlsee210 I waited day and night in dread lest my husband's sufferings should increase and thus make him suspect what his doctor and I in strictest accord had done our best to conceal from him for the last three months.† When in his last night ‘he fell peacefully asleep’, not in the conventional

sense in which this phrase is often—and perhaps mistakenly—used, but quite literally so, I experienced unadulterated happiness.

Here everything remains as it was; here I am surrounded by the rooms and things and people which were all as he wanted them to be, and here I myself wish to end my days. I have been deeply moved by the consideration with which my husband's colleagues were able to alleviate the torment of officialdom and to relieve me so effectively of all the practical difficulties which have to be dealt with straightaway. For through my policy of isolating myself from them I had put their backs up for twenty-seven years on end and had offended against all good manners. But the quite particularly intimate love and warmth which my husband's character called forth in his students and colleagues expressed itself in this way and was a great help to me. And it still helps, as I go through his papers day by day.

Nothing could be better for me at the moment than this accumulation of work, until his library and literary remains are handed over to the Berlin and Gottingen Academies of Science. Moreover, apart from this I long to return to my own professional work. And this longing could be quickly allayed if it were a question of treating people without means; no one has any money in our country, and so I must wait for a favourable opportunity, to save me from spending all my ready money. But perhaps I shall be lucky one day.

This letter is also meant for Anna, because in the pressure of clearing up things