Posted by Richard on  UTC 2025-02-01 08:00

Introduction

Nearly six years ago I published an account of the complicated relationship between Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), now regarded by many as Austria's 'National Poet' and a young woman, Heloise Höchner (1810-1848). That article, which contains many extracts from Heloise's letters, will give you a feel for the kind of person she was, adrift in a hopeless love affair. Reduced to a single sentence, it is the story of a young woman's love for an older man, a man who raised lack of commitment to an art form.

Grillparzer, then around forty years old, met the twenty year old Heloise sometime in 1830. After nearly eight years of Grillparzer's wimpish dithering in the face of Heloise's adoring love, she gave up on the ditherer and – with his permission! – became engaged to a Romanian architect/engineer, Alexander Costinescu. She followed him to Jassy [Iași], in Moldavia, in the far east of Romania, where they married at the end of 1838.

On completing that article I was curious about Heloise's life after her husband brought her to Jassy, but had little hope of following her thread through more than a century of historical turmoil in that region.

This impotence was very frustrating, though, since the more I discovered about her, the more interesting she became. For Eduard Castle, the Austrian literary gent whose piece about Grillparzer's eight year long, on-off dalliance with her first brought the subject to my attention, she was a fleeting, until then unknown walk-on part in the biography of the great man. Playing that game of literary critics down the ages, cherchez la femme, Castle inevitably saw Heloise through Grillparzer's eyes, as an incident within his biography.

Having nothing but contempt for Grillparzer as a writer and as a man, I preferred to see him as an incident in her biography. Both of them were in some way representative of their times: Grillparzer, nestling in the bureaucratic, feudal hierarchy of the Austrian Empire, allowed himself to be artistically neutered by that repressive regime in return for a regular pay-packet; Heloise, in matters of the heart, could have done with the counsel of a sensible older woman, but her mother had died when she was a child and in her father's Viennese household there seems to have been no suitable confidant available.

But Heloise's public destiny was to be the invisible woman: her role in Grillparzer's life is hardly known beyond Castle's account – she disappeared behind the aura of the great man. The move to Jassy with her husband took her outside the focus of Austrian culture – in effect, she vanished out of history.

I was too defeatist about ever being able to pick up the threads of Heloise's married life, for about three years after I published the article a descendent of hers contacted me. She had collected some papers about her ancestor and gave me access to her archive. Some of Heloise's documents and letters were destroyed in a house fire. Only great good fortune avoided her complete disappearance: a relative or friend had made a transcript of an autobiographical text, 'Family Notes', which was a memoir she wrote for her son Alexander. We also have a card memorialising her family that she wrote for her husband shortly after their wedding.

Let's look as the 'Family Notes' and the card, which will give us at least a starting point to answer the question: what was Heloise's life like after Grillparzer?

Notes for nerds

The German text is a typescript transcription of a manuscript written by Heloise. The manuscript was destroyed in the fire, so we have to rely on the transcription for our reading. How far can we trust the transcription? Is it an accurate or an 'improved' transcription?

If the former, we can be grateful to the transcriber for putting Heloise's erratic and difficult to read handwriting into a legible typescript. The typescript contains numerous errors, which give the impression that the transcription is faithful to the original. Our confidence in the fidelity of the transcription increases when we consider Heloise's use of language. Hers is not a simple case.

Since Heloise and her sisters were reared in a boarding school in Dijon between the age of five and eight, we can assume that French was the dominant language in her life at that time. Whether French was her mother tongue is not so easy to resolve: her parents were both native speakers of Swiss-German dialects, so that we might assume that in Nuits they spoke to each other in their native dialect, which Heloise and her sisters would certainly have absorbed. Her two brothers and her sister Susanna were born in Switzerland – in their earliest years their mother tongue would assuredly have been Swiss-German. It is difficult to imagine that the 'family language' of the Höchners in Nuits would have been anything other than Swiss-German. Life in a small French town meant that she would have also acquired demotic French from servants and playmates.

According to her own account she was around nine when she moved to Vienna. Here she spent an initial five years in another boarding school, where she would have acquired the spoken dialect of Vienna and would have been taught written German.

We do not know how rigorous the German teaching she received was, but at that time the teaching of women in academic subjects was usually anything but thorough. In short, it would appear that Heloise had a mixed salad of languages in spoken and written idioms in her head. We do not know how much exposure she had to German literature in her Viennese boarding school. She impressed Grillparzer with her easy command of French. Her education stopped when she was fourteen and, along with her sisters, she went to live with her father.

Written German, as we find it in this text, was certainly not her strong point – we know this also from the brief note about her family that she wrote on a card for her husband. Just to cap everything off, at the end of her language odyssey, she married a man with Romanian as his mother tongue.

So it seems probable that the transcriber faithfully reproduced Heloise's handwritten text, which is on the whole an account written in an extended stream of consciousness style intended for her first son to read, with many infelicities and erratic punctuation. At a very few points the transcriber has had to make some guesses to decipher Heloise's erratic hand.

We can assume that the transcriber had a typical modern education in written German, which means that we can further assume that the transcriber is not the source of the erratic and error-strewn German in this text. Someone who writes German as badly as Heloise does would hardly get through secondary school.

The translation into English given here has attempted to be faithful to the German transcription, whilst being readable. The punctuation of the English text has been made a little more orthodox to assist comprehension.

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