In October 1874 Uncle Tadeusz, with constricted heart, and Grandmother Bobrowska, with copious tears, took leave of Conrad. Despite many misgivings and warnings, they acquiesced in his wishes, gave him their blessing and allowed him to go freely into the world and to pursue a profession of which he knew almost nothing. He threw himself into the “unrelated existence” that had mysteriously seduced him and severed him from allegiance to his language, history, culture and traditions as well as from his patriotic duty as a Pole. He removed himself by great distances from the natural affections of the remnant of his family. And he broke away from his origins “under a storm of blame from every quarter which had the merest shadow of right to voice an opinion.” By cutting himself off from Poland, Conrad became a rootless wanderer: “through the blind force of circumstance [rather than through any rational, preconceived plan], the sea was to be all my world and the merchant service my only home for a long succession of [twenty] years.”1
From Cracow he traveled by train south to Vienna, west to Zurich and Lyons, and then down the valley of the Rhône to the great Mediterranean seaport of Marseilles. During his three and a half years in France, Conrad mastered his second language, learned the fundamentals of seamanship and—when he first had money of his own—became an extravagant spender. France gave Conrad the opportunity to realize his romantic ambitions and to live an independent and financially secure existence in a free country. Marseilles had a lively culture, rich food and wine, crusty bread and bouillabaisse, the warmth and vitality of the south, and attractive, dark-haired young girls. Living near or on the sea, and freed from the psychological stress of his family and his country, Conrad’s health, as the doctors predicted, showed a remarkable improvement.
The numerous allusions in A Personal Record create a lively picture of Marseilles. Conrad mentions two islands in the gulf, which housed the Planier lighthouse and the Château d’If, where Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo was imprisoned; the Old Town adjacent to the rectangular basin of the Old Port, guarded on both sides of the entrance by Fort St. Jean and Fort St. Nicolas; the Joliette breakwater near the Gare Maritime and the omnibus that rattled down the Quai de la Joliette toward the angular mass of the Fort; the wide and fashionable avenue du Prado, which runs east from the Old Port; and the white-and-red-striped pile of the Basilica of Notre Dame de la Garde, perched on a hill overlooking the ancient town. In 1878 Conrad lived in a lodging house owned by a Madame Fagot at 18 rue Sainte, a gently sloping street, close to the opera house, that runs parallel to one side of the Old Port.
The friends Conrad made in Marseilles belonged to three distinct classes—Royalists, bohemians and seamen—and reflected the social, intellectual and professional aspects of his character: his noble birth, his artistic interests and his desire to be a sailor. The wealthy shipowners, the Delestangs, were in their late seventies when he first became acquainted with them: “Madame Delestang, an imperious, handsome lady in a statuesque style, would carry me off now and then on the front seat of her carriage to the Prado, at the hour of fashionable airing.” Observing his profligate habits, she kindly advised him not to spoil his life. Her husband, a “frozen-up, mummified Royalist” who favored the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, had a “thin bony nose, a perfectly bloodless, narrow physiognomy clamped together as it were by short formal side-whiskers.” The Royalist circle gathered at the Café Bodoul on the rue St.Ferréol, which ran east from the principal thoroughfare, La Canebière.
The bohemian friends of “Young Ulysses” or “Monsieur Georges,” as Conrad was known in Marseilles, included his closest friend, Richard Fecht, a sober and sensible German from Württemberg, who acted as banker and liaison between Conrad and Uncle Tadeusz; Clovis Hugues, a journalist, poet and politician; the sculptor Frétigny, who became Prax in Conrad’s Marseilles novel, The Arrow of Gold; and Henry Grand, Conrad’s occasional English teacher, who became the model for the Professor of Languages in Under Western Eyes and of Mills in The Arrow of Gold.
With these friends the impressionable teenage apprentice first saw the plays of Victorien Sardou and Eugène Scribe, and heard the spectacular operas of Rossini and Verdi, which he still remembered with obvious pleasure at the end of his life. He would also have been attracted by the singing of a compatriot: “Theatrical life in Marseilles was flourishing at that time, particularly the opera, housed in the splendid building of the Grand Théâtre; from this period . . . date Conrad’s memories of listening to Meyerbeer’s works and to his favourite opera, Carmen. During Korzeniowski’s stay in Marseilles the principal tenor of the opera, Wladyslaw Mierzwinski, sang the part of Don José.”2 By 1893 Conrad had seen this opera fourteen times.
Conrad’s first maritime contact was Wiktor Chodzko, a Pole serving in the French merchant marine. Chodzko introduced him to Baptistin Solary, a cousin of the Delestangs and a ship’s chandler, well connected to everyone in the nautical trade, who good-naturedly promised to help the young man get his start on a decent ship: “This Solary (Baptistin), when I beheld him in the flesh, turned out quite a young man, very good-looking, with a fine black, short beard, a fresh complexion, and soft, merry black eyes.” He burst into Conrad’s hotel room, just after he arrived, flung open the shutters to the sun of Provence, and urged him “to be up and off instantly for a three years’ campaign in the South Seas.” Conrad’s connections with the Spanish rebels involved all three levels of Marseilles society: the Royalist friends who supported the cause, the bohemians who formed a syndicate to smuggle arms into Spain and the sailors who manned the Tremolino on this mission.
Conrad adapted remarkably well to maritime life. He began as an observer on pilot boats that guided ships into the harbor and took his first ocean voyage less than two months after arriving. In his memoirs, Conrad idealized the trusty sailors who welcomed him and initiated him into the craft:
The very first whole day I ever spent on salt water was by invitation, in a big half-decked pilot-boat, cruising under close reefs on the lookout, in misty, blowing weather, for the sails of ships and the smoke of steamers rising out there, beyond the slim and tall Planier lighthouse cutting the line of the wind-swept horizon with a white perpendicular stroke. They were hospitable souls, these sturdy Provençal seamen. Under the general designation of le petit ami de Baptistin I was made the guest of the Corporation of Pilots, and had the freedom of their boats night or day.
Conrad also recalled the first time he came alongside an English ship and was addressed in the language in which he was destined to work and to write. When he rowed up in a dinghy to board the James Westoll, a big, powerfully rigged cargo steamer, a fat fellow growled huskily above his head: “Look out there!” And when he came alongside the strange ship, it seemed almost alive: “I bore against the smooth flank of the first English ship I ever touched in my life, [and] felt it already throbbing under my open palm.”3 Those first three words had the same magical, talismanic effect on Conrad as did the sound of English spoken by the engineers who were building the St. Gotthard Tunnel in Switzerland.
After six weeks on the pilot boats, Conrad took the first of three voyages on French ships, owned by the Delestangs, from Marseilles to the Caribbean. On the first, five-month voyage, he traveled as a passenger on the Mont-Blanc, an old three-masted, four-hundred-ton barque, built in 1852. The ship left on December 11, 1874, stayed six weeks in St. Pierre, Martinique—on the west coast, north of the capital, Fort de France—and returned on May 23, 1875. In The Mirror of the Sea (1906), he described the storm they encountered on the westward passage to the Straits of Gibraltar and paraphrased Milton’s definition of fame in “Lycidas” (“that last infirmity of noble mind”) when portraying the abundant leaks:
The very first Christmas night I ever spent away from land was employed in running before a Gulf of Lyons gale, which made the old ship groan in every timber as she skipped between it over the short seas until we brought her to, battered and out of breath, under the lee of Majorca, where the smooth water was torn by fierce cat’s-paws under a very stormy sky.
We—or rather, they, for I had hardly had two glimpses of salt water in my life till then—kept her standing off and on all that day, while I listened for the first time with the curiosity of my tender years to the song of the wind in a ship’s rigging. . . . The wind was fair, but that day we ran no more.
The thing (I will not call her a ship twice in the same half-hour) leaked. She leaked fully, generously, overflowingly, all over—like a basket. I took an enthusiastic part in the excitement caused by that last infirmity of noble ships, without concerning myself much with the why or the wherefore.
On the second, six-month voyage to Martinique, from June 25, 1875, to December 23, 1875, Conrad sailed on the Mont-Blanc as an apprentice seaman. They stayed in St. Pierre for eight weeks and returned, with a cargo of timber and sugar, via St. Thomas (in the Danish Virgin Islands) and Haiti. The winter voyage back was very stormy and the ship was badly damaged by the time it reached Le Havre. Conrad, without waiting for repairs, disembarked in that port, where he lost his trunk, and returned to Marseilles by train, stopping for a few days in Paris on the way.
On his third and most significant voyage, Conrad earned thirty-five francs a month as a steward. The Saint-Antoine, a slightly larger but much newer three-masted barque, under Captain Escarras, left Marseilles on July 8, 1876, and returned on February 15, 1877. On the return journey, the ship went from St. Pierre to Cartagena in Colombia, to Puerto Cabello and La Guayra in Venezuela, to St. Thomas and to Haiti. His brief glimpse of the coast of South America became the germ of the setting of Nostromo. “If I ever mention 12 hours it must relate to P. Cabello where I was ashore at that time,” he later told his young friend Richard Curle. “In La Guayra as I went up the hill and had a distant view of Caracas I must have been 2½ to 3 days. It’s such a long time ago! And there was a few hours in a few other places on that dreary coast of Ven’la.”
The first mate on the ship was the forty-two-year-old Corsican, Dominic Cervoni, who became the model for Nostromo as well as for Peyrol in The Rover and Attilio in Suspense. In The Mirror of the Sea, Conrad portrays Dominic as tough, virile, capable and courageous:
There was nothing in the world sudden enough to take Dominic unawares. His thick black moustaches, curled every morning with hot tongs by the barber at the corner of the quay, seemed to hide a perpetual smile. But nobody, I believe, had ever seen the true shape of his lips. From the slow, imperturbable gravity of that broad-chested man you would think he had never smiled in his life. In his eyes lurked a look of perfectly remorseless irony, as though he had been provided with an extremely experienced soul; and the slightest distension of his nostrils would give to his bronzed face a look of extraordinary boldness. This was the only play of feature of which he seemed capable, being a Southerner of a concentrated, deliberate type. His ebony hair curled slightly on the temples. He may have been forty years old, and he was a great voyager on the inland [Mediterranean] sea.4
Conrad, storing his experiences and using them twenty and thirty years later in his novels, also saw during this voyage the originals of Heyst, Jones and Ricardo in Victory. The realistic basis that provided the imaginative germ for Heyst, the Swedish baron and rescuer of Lena, derived, Conrad said, from “my visual impressions of the man in 1876; a couple of hours in a hotel in St. Thomas (West Indies). There was some talk of him the night after he had left our party; but—all I heard of him might have been written down on a cigarette-paper. Except for these hints he’s altogether ‘invented.’ ” Conrad’s “Author’s Note” to Victory reveals that the merest glimpse of a squalid man (or even of a country) was sufficient to stimulate his imagination and lead to the creation of his ghastly and ferocious villains: “It was in a little hotel on the Island of St. Thomas . . . where we found [Jones] one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome significance. . . . It so happened that the very same year Ricardo—the physical Ricardo—was a fellow passenger of mine on board an extremely small and extremely dirty little schooner, during a four days’ passage between two places in the Gulf of Mexico.”5
The Saint-Antoine turned out to be the last French ship on which Conrad sailed. Three years later, at the request of Uncle Tadeusz, the owner sent Conrad a letter of recommendation:
We the undersigned C. Delestang & Son, late shipowners, certify that Conrad de Korzeniowski, native of Poland, entered our service in the month of February, 1874, as midshipman on board our vessel the Mont-Blanc, then served as lieutenant on board our ship the Saint-Antoine and left this last-named vessel after 3 years’ constant service in the West Indies and South America trade, on the 14th February, 1877, and that during that time he gave perfect satisfaction to his superior officers by his sobriety, general conduct and strict application in the discharge of his duties. Marseilles, 26th April, 1880. C. Delestang & Sons.6
This recommendation, very likely based on information supplied by Conrad and used as evidence to qualify for his second mate’s examination in the British merchant service, was, like some of his other maritime documents, extremely inaccurate and misleading. This letter added the aristocratic particle “de,” to which Conrad was not entitled; it began his service in February 1874, while he was still in school in Cracow, ten months before he actually set foot on the Mont-Blanc; it listed his positions as midshipman and lieutenant when, in fact, he was a passenger, an apprentice seaman and a steward; it credited him with service in South America, though he had been on the coast of that continent for only three days; and it awarded him “3 years’ constant service,” when his three voyages had lasted only thirteen months, with about five months in Caribbean ports.
Tired of bad food and bad weather, and perhaps somewhat disillusioned with the long periods of boredom and the dull companions on the ship after three consecutive voyages, Conrad spent the next year on land in Marseilles. Tadeusz had once observed that Conrad always behaved well at sea, but that “staying on land has always had an inauspicious influence upon you.” From February 1877 to February 1878 Conrad spent money extravagantly, smuggled guns into Spain, fell ill for the first time, lost even more money in speculation and gambling, and then, deeply depressed, committed a desperate act.
Conrad returned from his voyage on the Saint-Antoine to find two admonitory letters from Uncle Tadeusz. In the first letter of October 9, 1876, written while Conrad was still in the Caribbean, Tadeusz adopted his characteristically nagging, preaching tone. In a series of rhetorical questions and answers, he treated his favorite nephew as if he were a small child: “Last year you lost a trunk full of things—and tell me—what else had you to remember and look after if not yourself and your things? Do you need a nanny—and am I cast in that role? Now again, you have lost a family photograph and some Polish books—and you ask me to replace them! Why? So that you should take the first opportunity of losing them again!? He who appreciates something looks after it.” Tadeusz’s “dressing down,” however, did not prevent him “from loving you and blessing you, which I do with all my heart.”
Conrad received a generous allowance of two thousand francs (or four hundred dollars) a year—the equivalent of the annual salary of a lieutenant in the French navy.7 Yet he not only wildly overspent his allowance, but also had the irritating habit of telegraphing for additional money without bothering to explain why he needed it. This naturally produced a series of exasperated letters from the long-suffering Tadeusz. The letter of October 26, 1876, is representative. Starting with cool objectivity, Tadeusz suggested: “Let us . . . ask ourselves to what extent each of us has fulfilled his duties; for by answering this question, the recapitulation will enable us to correct any shortcomings that we may find in our conduct.” Fair enough. But Tadeusz, who apparently did not have any shortcomings of his own, immediately launched into a detailed criticism of Conrad’s fecklessness. He concluded that Conrad had spent, since leaving Poland, an extra 1,919 francs: “In short, during 2 years you have by your transgressions used up your maintenance for the whole third year!!! . . . Consider all that my dear—and you must admit that I am right—beat your breast—and swear to reform. . . . I would have refused my own son outright after so many warnings, but to you, the child of my Sister, grandson of my Mother . . . I, the victim of these absurdities, forgive you with all my heart, on condition, that it is for the first and last time!”8 Conrad was willing to endure any number of long-distance lectures as long as he could continue his extravagant habits and have Tadeusz pay for them. He may have occasionally beaten his breast but, despite these avuncular admonitions, had no intention—now, or at any time in the future—of changing his spendthrift ways.
Conrad began his costly involvement with the Carlists—who led a revolution from the Right—through the Royalist Delestangs in polite society and through a femme fatale called Rita de Lastaola (who later became a model for the heroine of The Arrow of Gold) in the demi-monde. Rita, despite her improbable background, actually existed, but she was not, as Conrad later claimed, his mistress. As Conrad’s worldly friend Joseph Retinger said of the Marseilles period: “I do not think that girls even then played a great rôle in his life.”9
In Conrad’s novel, Rita is born in the Basque country and spends her childhood tending goats in the hills near Tolosa. At the age of thirteen, she is sent from Spain to Paris by her uncle, a fanatical priest, to live with another uncle, an orange merchant. A few years later, Rita meets a rich painter, Allègre, becomes his model and mistress, and is transformed into a sophisticated society woman. After Allègre’s death, she becomes the mistress of Don Carlos, pretender to the throne of Spain.
The immediate cause of the Carlist Wars was the dispute about whether the eldest daughter of King Ferdinand VII was entitled to succeed to the Spanish throne in 1833. Ferdinand had abrogated the Salic Law, which excluded females from succession to the crown, in favor of his daughter, who became Queen Isabella II. Ferdinand’s brother Don Carlos refused to recognize Isabella and claimed the throne for himself. A civil war followed, in which the Basque provinces and Catalonia supported the ultra-reactionary and ultra-clerical Carlists, who were defeated in 1840.
Raymond Carr observes that Carlism was both reactionary and romantic:
The Carlism of the [eighteen-]thirties was a negative creed, a crusade “for the elimination of the liberal canaille” . . . as the residual legatee of sixteenth-century heresy and eighteenth-century atheism. . . .
It was a revolution of frustration, a revolution of the inadaptables, from the prince who had been pushed aside by court faction to the violent men who took to the hills in Catalonia and Aragon. Such men became the prisoners of an intransigent ideal: legitimacy and the Catholic unity of Spain. Against the court of Isabella stood the austere court of the true king, Charles V, regular in his habits and punctilious in his devotions, his army under the supreme command of the Virgin of the Sorrows. . . .
Carlism, therefore, remained a romantic epic in which selfless devotion to an ideal was soiled by treason, desertion, and incapacity.10
In 1873, after the abdication of King Amadeus of Spain and the declaration of the Republic, the Carlists seized large parts of northeast Spain. The Second Carlist War ended in 1876, a year after Alfonso XII, the son of Isabella, was proclaimed king. Don Carlos was defeated and escaped to France. But the Carlists, who later supported Franco in the Spanish Civil War, remained a powerful force in Spanish politics until 1939.
Conrad sketches the historical background of the novel, and of his own involvement in the cause, at the beginning of The Arrow of Gold. Alluding to the proclamation of the two-year Republic in 1873 and the rising in the Basque provinces, he declares that in “the middle years of the seventies, Don Carlos de Bourbon, encouraged by the general reaction of all Europe against the excesses of communistic Republicanism [after the Paris Commune of 1871], made his attempt for the throne of Spain, arms in hand, amongst the hills and gorges of Guipuzcoa.” The supporters of the rising wanted “to organize a supply by sea of arms and ammunition to the Carlist detachments in the South.”
Conrad’s rather naïve and romantic support of the Carlists in 1877 resembled Tennyson’s involvement with the Spanish revolutionaries who had opposed Ferdinand VII in 1830. Tennyson and his friend Arthur Hallam took money and coded dispatches in invisible ink to the revolutionaries gathering in the Pyrenees while his Cambridge friends bought a ship to take the rebels to Spain and outfitted it with arms and provisions. The venture ended disastrously when the rising was brutally suppressed, and one of Tennyson’s Cambridge friends was captured and executed.11
Conrad’s motives for joining the Carlists were an odd mixture of expediency, opportunity, idealism and commitment. “We were all ardent Royalists of the snow-white Legitimist complexion—Heaven only knows why!” wrote Conrad, with considerable irony. Busza suggests that his (residual) Catholicism, which had led to an “Austrophil orientation,” also aroused his sympathy for “such ultramontanist ventures as the Carlist war.” Ford, who knew Conrad well, stresses the romantic and adventurous attraction: “The cause of the Carlists sufficiently appealed to Conrad: it was Legitimist; it was picturesque and was carried on with at least some little efficiency.”12 Conrad had been painfully familiar in Poland with the appeal of lost causes and still had an Apollo-like devotion to an ideal—like that of the Polish rising of 1863—that “was soiled by treason, desertion, and incapacity.” The teenage Conrad may also have engaged in the exciting venture for simpler reasons: his friends urged him to join them, and he wanted to earn some money, to please Rita and to help change the course of contemporary history.
Whatever his motives, Conrad formed a syndicate with three friends to buy the prettily named balancelle the Tremolino, whose name means “rustling of the wind,” and to carry arms for the Carlists from hidden coves on the coast near Marseilles to the Gulf of Rosas in the northeast corner of Spain. The oldest partner, nearly thirty, was a Southern gentleman—Américain, catholique et gentilhomme—who claimed to live by the sword and eventually died by it in a Balkan squabble involving Serbs or Bulgarians. John Mason Key Blunt was “keen of face and elegantly slight of body, of distinguished aspect, with a fascinating drawing-room manner and with a dark, fatal glance.” In The Arrow of Gold he also appears under his own name and is Monsieur George’s villainous but unsuccessful rival for Doña Rita. At the end of the novel, he wounds George in a duel.
The second member, Henry Grand, the English teacher who lived a few doors down from Conrad on the rue Sainte, “had broken loose from the unyielding rigidity of his family, solidly rooted, if I remember rightly, in a well-to-do London suburb. . . . Narrow-chested, tall and short-sighted, he strode along the streets and the lanes, his long feet projecting far in advance of his body, and his white nose and gingery moustache buried in an open book: for he had the habit of reading as he walked.” The third partner of the syndicate, who is briefly introduced and then disappears from Conrad’s memoir, “was Roger P. de la S——, the most Scandinavian-looking of Provençal squires, fair, and six feet high, as became a descendant of sea-roving Northmen, authoritative, incisive, wittily scornful.”
The captain of the ship would of course be the trusty Dominic Cervoni. When, Conrad says, he introduced Dominic to Rita and sought her approval, she was impressed by his massive mustache and his remorseless eyes: “he looked [suitably] piratical and monkish and darkly initiated into the most awful mysteries of the sea.” And she immediately exclaimed, in her best grande dame manner: “Mais il est parfait, cet homme.”
According to Conrad’s account in The Mirror of the Sea, the Tremolino, officially known as a fruit and cork-wood trader but actually smuggling contraband arms, was betrayed by Dominic’s nephew César Cervoni (the third member of the crew). When she is pursued by a Spanish patrol boat, Conrad exclaims: “She will never catch the Tremolino,” but Dominic, observing that the roping stitches on the sail have been cut, realizes they have been treacherously sold. Dominic decides to destroy rather than surrender the boat by smashing it on the rocks and to escape with ten thousand francs he has hidden on board. Furious with César—who has also, unbeknownst to him, stolen the money—Dominic throws him overboard and César sinks with all the cash in a belt around his waist. “No ship ran so joyously to her death,” Conrad writes of the dangerous venture. “At one moment the rush and the soaring swing of speed; the next a crash, and death, stillness. . . . The Tremolino, with her plucky heart crushed at one blow, had slipped off into deep water to her eternal rest.”13
Conrad scholars have found no trace of a ship called the Tremolino in the Marseilles maritime records; they have discovered that César was not related to Dominic and, far from drowning with a money belt, survived to sail for many long years. Though the details of the story are suspect, the unpublished memoirs of one of Conrad’s oldest English friends, G. F. W. Hope, who had extensive experience at sea and who met Conrad in 188o, long before he became a writer, confirms that some such incident actually happened. Conrad would have no reason to lie to a close friend and, in any case, could not have deceived him. In Hope’s version of the story, the fourth partner was not French, but Spanish; the ship was not a balancelle, but a lateen (a similar Mediterranean ship, with a triangular sail set on a long sloping yard):
Conrad told the story of when he was a youngster about eighteen, where he joined a party of four, an Englishman, an American, a Spaniard and himself, in Don Carlos’s party when the Spaniards were trying to get up a revolution. They ran two cargoes but when running the third, a Spanish Revenue cruiser hove in sight and chased them, and finally they had to run their lateen ashore on the rocks and only just escaped with their lives.
In 1919 the older Conrad took a more practical and prosaic view of the affair, and emphasized the kind of peril and adventure that his father had experienced in Poland: “All this gun-running was a very dull, if dangerous business. . . . As to intrigues, if there were any, I didn’t know anything of them. But, in truth, the Carlist invasion was a very straightforward adventure conducted with inconceivable stupidity and a foredoomed failure from the first.”14
In a long and crucially important letter of March 24, 1879, to Stefan Buszczynski—Apollo’s friend and biographer, and (for a short time) Conrad’s former guardian—Tadeusz explained how Conrad’s affairs had reached a crisis during the previous year. In March 1877, a month after returning to Marseilles on the Saint-Antoine and just before he planned to depart on his fourth voyage, for which Tadeusz had generously advanced him three thousand francs, Conrad became ill for four weeks with an anal abscess, which prevented him from sailing again with Captain Escarras. The captain expressed his regret in a letter to Tadeusz; and Conrad, his uncle explained, “not wishing to sign on under another captain, remained in Marseilles pursuing his theoretical studies and awaiting the return of his chief with whom he was to make a voyage round the world.” Conrad’s theoretical studies included some English and seamanship as well as idling, smuggling and gambling.
Though Conrad felt certain he would accompany Captain Escarras on his next voyage, in the autumn of 1877, the French Office of Military Conscription forbade him to go, Tadeusz said, “on the grounds of his being a 21-year-old alien who was under the obligation of doing [Russian] military service in his own country”—even though Conrad (who was actually nineteen and may have lied about his birth date to get better employment) would not reach the age of twenty-one until December 1878. The authorities discovered that Conrad had never obtained a permit to sail from the Russian consul; the Inspector of the Port of Marseilles, who had been persuaded (perhaps by the Delestangs, who seemed quite willing to bend the rules) to acknowledge officially the existence of such a permit, was severely reprimanded and nearly lost his job. After losing his temper and quarreling with Delestang, Conrad was forced to stay behind, with no hope of serving on French vessels.
Conrad’s problems with the French authorities were followed by a financial catastrophe. While still in possession of the three thousand francs advanced by Tadeusz, Conrad met Captain Duteil of the Mont-Blanc, “who persuaded him to participate in some enterprise on the coasts of Spain—some kind of contraband! He invested 1,000 fr. in it and made over 400 which pleased them greatly so that on the second occasion he put in all he had—and lost the lot.” It seems that Captain Duteil had urged him to join the Tremolino smugglers, and that the ship, after an initially successful foray, was wrecked sometime after October 14, 1877.
In early March 1878 Conrad, unable to work on a French ship, without any money and deeply in debt—for he had purchased equipment for his projected voyage and lived on credit while smuggling—borrowed eight hundred francs from his reliable friend Richard Fecht and unsuccessfully tried to join the American naval squadron at Villefranche. Then, attempting to recover his considerable losses, he risked everything at the casino in Monte Carlo and lost the eight hundred francs he had borrowed from Fecht.
Speaking of Conrad’s previous misdemeanors in an earlier letter, Tadeusz had told him: “Certainly, there is no reason for one to take one’s life . . . because of some folly one has committed.” Yet that is what Conrad tried to do—and Tadeusz may later have felt guilty for having mentioned it. After losing his money in Monte Carlo, Conrad returned to Marseilles, invited Fecht to tea, left Tadeusz’s address in a conspicuous place so that Fecht could instantly inform him of what had happened and, Tadeusz said, “before [Fecht’s] arrival attempts to take his life with a revolver. . . . The bullet goes durch und durch [straight through] near his heart without damaging any vital organ.”
Tadeusz, absolutely certain that Conrad was contentedly sailing somewhere in the Antipodes, suddenly, amidst all his agricultural business at the spring fair in Kiev, “received a telegram: ‘Conrad blessé, envoyez argent—arrivez’ [Conrad wounded, send money—come]. . . . I set off at once from Kiev on [March 8], and arrived at Marseilles on [March 11]. I found Konrad already out of bed and having had a previous talk with his friend Mr. Richard Fecht, a most prudent and worthy young man [and notable contrast to Conrad], I saw the victim in person.” After finding out what had happened and telling everyone that Conrad had been wounded in a duel, Tadeusz, “influenced by considerations of our national honour,” paid Conrad’s substantial debts.15 These amounted to an additional three thousand francs: 1,700 to Fecht; 1,000 to another friend, Bonnard; 230 to his landlady, Madame Fagot; and 70 to the doctor.
“Suicide,” Conrad later wrote in Chance, attributing it to enervation rather than to excitement, “is very often the outcome of mere mental weariness—not an act of savage energy but the final symptom of complete collapse.” Apollo, who had suffered far more in Russia than Conrad did in Marseilles, never, even in his most pessimistic and despairing moments, succumbed to the temptation of suicide. Lacking the belief and the constraints of his father’s faith, and far from his family and his homeland, Conrad felt desperately lonely. Brooding over the apparent wreck of his nautical career and the stupid squandering of a considerable fortune, he felt he had betrayed his uncle’s trust and dishonored his name, and fell into a morbid depression.
But Conrad did not make a serious attempt at suicide. Later on, reflecting on his own experience, he wrote that he had been more frightened by the finality of death than by the awful circumstances of his life: “There are those who talk like that of suicide. And then there is always something lacking, sometimes strength, sometimes perseverance, sometimes courage. The courage to succeed or the courage to recognize one’s impotence. What remains always cruel and ineradicable is the fear of finality. One temporizes with Fate, one seeks to deceive desire, one tries to play tricks with one’s life. Men are always cowards. They are frightened of the expression ‘nevermore.’ ”
His son John later reported that when he was “looking at some scars just below [Conrad’s] left shoulder in the pectoral muscle, [he thought] the white weals looked as though they had been made with a sword or cutlass. There were two about an inch long, tapering together towards the top.”16 Though Conrad told John he had been wounded in a sword duel, he had actually been wounded by a bullet, near his shoulder rather than his heart, which went straight through his pectoral muscle without threatening his vital organs. Tadeusz heard by telegram, before he left Kiev, that Conrad was already better. Rescued by Fecht, he was out of bed by the time his uncle arrived in Marseilles. Conrad’s rash, but not very dangerous, act was an extremely effective plea for help. It summoned Tadeusz from Russia, solved his financial problems in France and led to a new life in England.
Later, after returning to the Ukraine, Tadeusz repeated his necessary, if futile, admonitions: “You were idling for nearly a whole year—you fell into debt, you deliberately shot yourself. . . . Really, you have exceeded the limits of stupidity permitted to your age!”—though Tadeusz never defined precisely how stupid a teenager was allowed to be. The highly strung youth had been extremely foolish, selfish and irresponsible, but the generous Tadeusz—thankful that he was alive—was inclined to forgive him. After observing his behavior in Marseilles, Tadeusz told Buszczynski that Conrad had none of the common vices of a sailor. He did not drink, he did not gamble (apart from the one serious lapse in Monte Carlo), he had good manners, he was popular with both sailors and officers, and he was skilled in his profession: “He is not a bad boy, only one who is extremely sensitive, conceited, reserved, and in addition excitable. In short I found in him all the defects of the [Korzeniowski] family.”17
Conrad urgently needed to change his nationality in order to free himself from military obligations in Russia. At various times in his early life he considered becoming a citizen of Austria, France, Switzerland and America—even of Japan or one of the South American republics. Finally, hoping to become a British citizen, he decided to join the largest fleet in the world, the British merchant marine, which did not require any of the French formalities for alien seamen. On April 24, 1878, less than two months after he had shot himself, Conrad signed on the Mavis, a 764-ton English steamship, carrying coal from Marseilles to Constantinople. When re-ordering his life for his memoirs, Conrad tried to make it appear as if he had always been predestined to serve on English ships: “if a seaman, then an English seaman.”18 In fact, his life had been radically changed—for the third time—by a series of events that began with an infection between his buttocks.