What are the 'Family Notes' and why were they written?

Autobiography or diary?

What exactly is this document, the 'Family Notes'? Can we call it an autobiography? But autobiographies and biographies are written with hindsight; coherence is imposed upon them. Thus the period up until Alexander's birth is clearly autobiographical, a record of her life up to and including the birth of her first child for him to read. We can understand that.

But after Alexander's birth her memoir becomes a sort of diary, in which each entry is unaware of future entries. For example, on 14th February 1841, she states that '[Alexander's] wet nurse is very good and dutiful'. Six months later, on 26th August 1841, she's much wiser: 'His wet nurse is very weak and very ill'.

The sporadic nature of the entries is such that we also find little retrospection or even recall of previous entries. The things she writes about are frequently expressions of her current mood and situation. Illnesses, for example, are described as they are experienced, a chain of hopes, wishes and disappointments which often only end in disaster. She prays effusively to God for help, then in a later entry we find out whether that prayer was answered. Caught up in the moment, as she is, there is no time for reflection.

As such, it is difficult for us to understand what this memoir was intended to do. If the second part is a diary, it is not the sort of diary we are used to: quite long periods of her life go unmentioned; quotidian trivia is largely missing; we gain almost no insight at all into the wider world in which she lived.

The document really does restrict itself, after the first properly autobiographical section describing Heloise's childhood and background, to a catalogue of family events, in this case births, illnesses and deaths within the nuclear family. We could see it as an example of the 'family chronicles', in which heads of bourgeois families at that time would record major events – particularly births, marriages and deaths – within their families. Perhaps this is what Heloise was intending when she started the document. We might therefore call this second part a family chronicle, except that to do so neglects the storm of emotions surrounding the events it describes. In this respect, the one exception to the focus on the nuclear family is striking: this is the entry on Sunday 17th April 1842 in which she worries about her sister Susanna's illness. No, it's a diary.

How often did Heloise write entries in the 'Family Notes'?

The timeline below displays Heloise's activity in the second, diary part of her 'Family Notes'.

Heloise dated the start of her 'Family Notes' as 1st January 1841, suggestively on New Year's Day and about five months after the birth of Alexander on 28th July 1840.

The timeline is based upon dated entries. A significant event without an entry date is enclosed in [square brackets]. The time difference between entries is given and the vertical spacing between them is proportional to that.

Although we have called the dated entries in the 'Family Notes' a diary, the timeline shows us what an odd diary this is. Months and even years go by between entries, except for a striking cluster of entries in the second half of 1841 that document son Alexander's first serious illness. There are no entries at all in 1843.

Lonely and isolated

We might think that the autobiographical section was the original 'Family Notes' intended for Alexander, who, as the first child, would eventually become the head of the household. In this section we find no trace of her eight-year dalliance with Grillparzer, which is probably only to be expected.

What follows in the 'diary' section might be taken as desperate outbursts from a lonely and isolated person, which happened to be written down in the only document available, perhaps in the expection or hope that someone at sometime would read them.

Lonely and isolated. We ask ourselves where were the people to whom she could confide? Her siblings were in Vienna, her husband – seemingly a sensitive soul struggling with his own physical and mental troubles – perhaps could not take or cope with her misery, too. 'He has a weak constitution', she notes. At one low point she tells us that she affects cheerfulness in order not to make her husband's depressive state of mind worse. She is apparently used to doing this – after her father's business failed, she took on the task of cheering him up:

However, I did not allow my feelings to show, but rather strove with all my powers to seem cheerful and usually, with a thousand jests, I succeeded in cheering up the loved one.

'Family Notes'

Then there is the bizarre entry in which she expresses her hope that the children will always behave themselves and thus avoid causing him unmanageable psychological distress.

If she can't talk to a husband who seems to be oblivious to her pain, in whom can she confide? At least with Grillparzer she had a relatively normal(?) person to whom she could express her feelings in conversation and in letters. That said, Grillparzer was also a depressive from a mentally unstable family, so we could reasonably suspect that she needed to cheer him up, too.

We hear of no female friends, bar one – and that one, Ermiona Asachi, only obliquely. She really was a stranger in a strange land.

The object of love

The 'Family Notes' ends with the death of the five-year-old Alexander, which suggests that the recipient of the document had indeed been intended to be him, the firstborn.

Are we to assume that Heloise wrote these notes for her firstborn, ignoring the rest of the family, her other children, her husband and her sisters she left behind? It seems so, for she tells us as much as she concludes her text:

I wrote this little book for him, he was the object of all the thoughts that I wrote down here. Who more than he knew how to value our tenderness, who needed love more than he, who lived from love, whose entire life was love. My Alexo, my angelic child, will you see my pain and will you love me in eternity as you have loved me here on Earth? Oh my child, my dear being, all my thoughts are yours.

'Family Notes'

She is not the only woman for whom a baby became an emotional crutch, demanding and appreciating the depth of love that no one else wanted from her. Giving love seems to be a deep need of hers.

She tells us how much love and care she gave to her depressed father after his business had collapsed. Grillparzer kept his distance during the eight years she offered him love; how energetically she sprang to his side when he just hinted that he might be looking for another apartment! Costinescu seems to be a cold fish, probably in need of professional help, but even so, Heloise cheers him up when he is down and from time to time overwhelms us with exorbitant professions of love for him. We get the impression that her role in life, from her earliest years, was to give love to other people.

Her subsequent children are loved, but the emotional anchor to the needy firstborn remained intact. Marie and Emil are robust and flourish, but will succeed with or without her. After the terrible time she experienced following her arrival in Jassy, then her illness and a stillborn child, we can imagine the desperate emotional state she must have been in when her firstborn arrived after the climax of a terrible delivery.

The addressee

Could she really be writing for some adult manifestation of her son say thirty years hence? In this confessional mode of writing it becomes increasingly difficult to visualise the recipient as Alexander. But then, after Alexander's death it appears that she wrote no more, for anyone. The child who depended on her most had gone. The writing of the 'Family Notes' seems to have been yet one more act of love for this needy child.

Strangely, though, Heloise writes a document for Alexander, but hardly ever addresses him directly, as one might expect if she assumed that he would be reading the document at some stage in his life. The 'Family Notes' are 'for' Alexander, but hardly ever address him personally. Indeed, she much more often addresses her God directly with prayers for aid in moments of trouble and with gratitude for divine deliverance than the nominal recipient of the document.

A rare example of a change of addressee is to be found in the quotation given above, in which she first addresses the reader, referring to Alexander in the third person: for him… he… he… he…. Then she addresses him directly in the second person: you… you… you… yours…. But, in the stress of great emotion, all can be allowed.

For having, it seems, no one in whom she can confide her thoughts, she is not speaking to a person, she is 'speaking to paper', to use Michel de Montaigne's phrase: Je parle au papier comme je parle au premier que je rencontre, 'I speak to paper as I speak to the first person I meet'. [Essais, III, XXVIII: De l'utile et de l'honneste].

Her husband, excessively praised at times, is puzzlingly quite out of the loop in the 'Family Notes'. Did he even know that this was being written? Did he ever see this text (before Heloise's death, that is). Did he ever see this text at all? For Heloise, was the simple expression of love for him, spoken to paper, sufficient?