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Vienna, Sunday
September 16, 1883
My sweet little woman
I also want to ask for something: that you accept from me, as an atonement for some mean thoughts and some criticism which did not do you justice, the two things you have wished for. I will get the little dictionary, and you must let me know what the jacket is going to cost. If I cannot afford it now, I want to be allowed to do it later, next month. But don't deny yourself, my precious, any
little luxury; I don't. And you are so young and can be so pleased with things, and I know that everyone who sees you wants to give you some pleasure, so why shouldn't I be allowed to do the same? Your letter moves me like the voice of an angel, and helps me to rise above all my silly worries about you and above my deeply shattered emotional condition. I did not want to talk about it on our monthly memorial day, but I cannot conceal it from you any longer: I have just returned from the funeral of my friend Nathan Weiss.1
On the thirteenth, at 2 P.M., he hanged himself in a public bath in the Landstrasse. He had been married hardly a month and had returned ten days ago from his honeymoon. He left two letters, one to the police asking them to inform his parents tactfully and to suppress any word of it in the newspapers, the other to his wife. By Thursday evening the news was already known in the hospital, a colleague rushed to his apartment to take him to the hospital in order to scotch the rumor; but the door was locked. His brother, Sekundararzt in the hospital, confirmed the news. Early on Friday morning Lustgarten2 came to see me while I was still in bed, soon afterwards two other colleagues, all with the same news, but we just could not believe it, it was too difficult to conceive of a man who combined in himself more restlessness and zest for life than we had seen in anyone else, as dead and silent. Even now, though I have just heard the thud of the earth on his coffin, I cannot get used to the thought.
And why did he do it?