A poor struggler of a sick painter like myself

Do you remember the woman we met when you visited me during the summer, whom I said was a model I had found, adding that I had discovered that she was pregnant, for which reason I was trying all the harder to help her.

It was shortly afterward that I fell ill myself. At that point she was in the hospital at Leyden, and I got a letter from her in the clinic where I was, telling me she was in great trouble. Before that time - during the winter, when she was in a very bad way indeed - I had done what I could, and now I had a fierce inner struggle trying to decide what to do. Could I - should I help? - I was ill myself, and the future looked so dark. For all that, I got up against the doctor's wishes and went to see her. I visited her in the hospital at Leyden on July 1. The night before, she had given birth to a little boy, who was lying asleep in his little cradle by her bedside, his little turned-up nose just outside the covers - unconscious, of course, of what was going on in the world. At least a poor struggler of a sick painter like myself knows a few things that a tiny baby like that doesn't know.

And what should I do? - I had some hard thinking to do at that moment. The mother, poor creature, had had a very difficult confinement. Aren't there moments in life when it is criminal to remain impassive and say, What business is it of mine?

To Anton von Rappard, from The Hague, 4 February 1883, Letter R20
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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