Read Online The Trial of Elizabeth Cree by Peter Ackroyd - Free Book Online

prompter’s head seen from the pit of the theater, and I must admit that I applauded my own work. But then there came a noise from the wings, and I walked quickly by the riverside until I came out by Ludgate.

FIFTEEN
    J ohn Cree was wrong in assuming that the German scholar lived in Scofield Street. On that foggy night in early September, Karl Marx was simply calling upon a friend. He visited Solomon Weil once a week for an evening of philosophical discussion. They had met in the Reading Room of the British Museum eighteen months before, when they had found themselves sitting side by side: Marx had noticed that his neighbor was studying Freher’s
Serial Elucidation of the Cabbala
, and all at once remembered reading it himself when he was a student at the University of Bonn. They had started speaking in German together, perhaps because they recognized some familial resemblance (Solomon Weil had been born in Hamburg, coincidentally in the same month and year as Marx himself), and soon enough they discovered a similar interest in theoretical inquiry and subtle disputes of learning. It is true that in his published writings, and in particular in the earliest of them, Karl Marx had condemned what he described as a degraded Judaism. In one of his first essays, “On the Jewish Question,” he had concluded “
ist der Jude unmöglich geworden
” or “the Jew becomes impossible.” But Marx himself sprang from a long line of rabbis and was deeply imbued with the vocabulary and the preoccupations of Judaism. Now, at the end of his life, the sudden glimpse of a commentary upon the Cabbala was enough to launch him into a torrent of German conversation with Solomon Weil, and an almost inexplicable affection for this scholar who was studying one of the books of his youth. He had spent most of his life inpersistent invective against all forms of religious belief but, as he sat beneath the great dome of the Reading Room, he was strangely moved and excited. They left the Museum together that evening, and agreed to meet the following day. It must be said that Solomon Weil himself was a little perplexed. He had heard of Marx through other German émigrés, and was surprised to find this atheist and revolutionary so charming and erudite a companion. He had, perhaps, been even too polite; but Solomon Weil assumed, correctly, that Marx was trying to atone for his vindictive assaults upon his own old faith.
    During their second conversation, held in a small chophouse off Coptic Street, Solomon Weil mentioned to Marx that he had acquired a large library of cabbalistic and esoteric learning: he had some four hundred volumes in his lodgings, and at once Marx asked if he might examine them. That was the origin of their regular weekly suppers in Limehouse, where the two men would exchange theories and speculations as if they were young scholars again. Weil’s library was remarkable—many of the books in his collection had once belonged to the Chevalier d’Éon, the famous French transsexual, who had lodged in London in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The Chevalier had been particularly interested in cabbalistic lore, largely because of its emphasis upon an original divine androgyny from which the two sexes sprang. D’Éon bequeathed his collection to an artist and Freemason, William Cosway, who in turn had left it to a mezzotint engraver with whom he had collaborated in certain occult experiments. This engraver then converted to Judaism, and in gratitude for his newly awakened faith left his entire library to Solomon Weil. So the old books were now shelved in his rooms at 7 Scofield Street, together with some of Weil’s own acquisitions such as
A Second Warning to the World by the Spirit of Prophecy
and
Signs of Times, or A Voice to Babylon, the Great City ofthe World and to the Jews in Particular
. Weil had also purchased a collection of material devoted to the life and writings of Richard Brothers, the visionary and British