Labyrinths: Emma Jung, Her Marriage to Carl and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis. Catrine Clay
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СКАЧАТЬ what to do about the wedding? It was a terrible dilemma for Emma who had, over the years, watched her father’s decline in horror and shame, and now he would not be able to attend the ceremony, or walk her up the aisle, or give her away.

      Before leaving the country Carl had to complete his Swiss army military service, an annual duty for all Swiss males between the ages of twenty and fifty, in his case as a lieutenant in the medical corps. But then he was off, first paying a visit to his mother and sister in Basel on his way to France. From Paris he wrote daily letters to Emma, and separately to her mother too, giving them all the news: he lived cheaply in a hotel for one franc a day and worked in Pierre Janet’s laboratory at the Salpêtrière, attending all the eminent psychologist’s lectures. He had enrolled at the Berlitz School to improve his English and started reading English newspapers, a habit he retained all his life. He went to the Louvre most days, fell in love with Holbein, the Dutch Masters and the Mona Lisa, and spent hours watching the copyists make their living selling their work to tourists like himself. He walked everywhere, through Les Halles, the Jardin du Luxembourg and the Bois de Boulogne, sitting in cafés and bistros watching the world, rich and poor, go by, and in the evenings he read French and English novels, the classic ones, never the modern. He also saw Helly and her sister Vally, both now working as seamstresses for a Paris fashion house, and he was grateful for their company, not only because he knew no one else in Paris, but because Helly was generous enough to forgive him his past sins. When the weather turned cold Bertha Rauschenbach posted off a winter coat to keep him warm. It wasn’t the only thing she sent him: when he expressed a longing to commission a copy of a Frans Hals painting of a mother and her children, the money was quickly dispatched.

      By January Carl was in London, visiting the sights and the museums and taking more English lessons. It must have been his English tutor, recently down from Oxford, who delighted Carl by taking him back to dine at his college high table with the dons in their academic gowns – a fine dinner, as he wrote to Emma, followed by cigars, liqueurs and snuff. The conversation was ‘in the style of the 18th century’ – and men only, ‘because we wanted to talk exclusively at an intellectual level’. In 1903 it was still common for men to be seen as more intellectual than women, and there were no women at high table to disagree. It was Jung’s first brush with the English ‘gentleman’ and he never forgot it, the word often appearing in his letters as a mark of the highest praise.

      In Schaffhausen, Emma received a present. It was a painting. In between all his other activities Carl took the time in Paris to travel out into the flat countryside with his easel and paints. He had always loved painting, even as a child, and in future it would go hand in hand with his writing, offering a poetic and spiritual dimension to his words. He found a spot on a far bank of the River Seine, looking across at a hamlet of pitched-roof houses, a church with a high spire, and trees all along. But the real subject of the painting was the clouds, which took up three-quarters of the canvas: light and shining below, dark and dramatic above. The inscription read: ‘Seine landscape with clouds, for my dearest fiancée at Christmas, 1902. Paris, December 1902. Painted by C. G. Jung.’

      It might have been a premonition of their marriage.

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      The painting Carl sent Emma for Christmas 1902.

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      Emma and Carl got married twice: first the civil ceremony on 14 February, with just a few family members in attendance – Carl’s mother and sister, and Emma’s sister Marguerite but not her mother or father – followed by an evening wedding ball at the Hotel Bellevue Neuhausen overlooking the Rhine Falls. Then, two days later, a church wedding in the Steigkirche, the Protestant Reformed Church in Schaffhausen, at which both mothers were present, but not Emma’s father. The bridal couple arrived at the church in the high Rauschenbach carriage used only for weddings, decorated with winter flowers and driven by coachman Braun: Carl in his newly acquired silk top hat and tails, Emma in her white gown, veil and fur cape against the cold – luckily there was no snow that February – waving and smiling at well-wishers left and right. The service was followed by a wedding banquet at Ölberg. Later, on 1 March, there was a further festivity at the Hotel Schiff for the employees of the Rauschenbach factories and foundry.

      The wedding banquet was grand, as expected for the eldest daughter of a family of such wealth and high standing: twelve courses, starting with lobster bisque, followed by local river trout, toast and foie gras, a sorbet to precede the main course of pheasant with artichoke hearts accompanied by a variety of salads. The dessert course offered puddings, patisserie, cakes, ice creams and fruit, and each course was accompanied by a selection of wines, ending with a choice of liqueurs, sherry, port or champagne, and finally, coffee, cigars and cigarettes. The bridal couple sat side by side at a long table covered in white damask, decorated with wedding flowers, the family silver, china and glass; the servants of the house in their starched uniforms running to and fro, augmented by extra waiters from the town, each guest assigned their placement. The couple were flanked by their relations and facing the guests: Emma with her veil off her face now, her hair coiled up in the style of the times, Carl in his wedding fraque with a stiff white collar and fancy waistcoat, listening to a long list of toasts and speeches, everything as it should be, at least on the surface.

      Except that the father of the bride was not present, a fact which did not escape the guests. Nor, of course, was the father of the groom, Pastor Jung – how to put it – having died some years previously. Then there was the fact that the mother of the groom was extremely large. And the puzzle that Frau Rauschenbach apparently was not present at the civil wedding, only the church wedding two days later. Above all there was the fact that the groom was a penniless doctor, not even a regular one but an Irrenarzt, a doctor of the insane, working in a Zürich lunatic asylum, marrying Emma Rauschenbach, one of the richest and most desirable young women in Switzerland.

      Emma’s wedding present to Carl was a gold fob watch and chain from the Rauschenbach factory, a magnificent piece of Swiss craftsmanship engraved around the upper inside rim with the words ‘Fräulein Emma Rauschenbach’ and ‘Dr C. G. Jung’ around the lower, with a charming design of lilies-of-the-valley at the centre, encircling two hands joined in matrimony, the date inscribed on a ribbon below: 16 February 1903. Not the 14th, then, but the 16th. Not the day of the civil wedding but of the church wedding. For Carl the church wedding was of little concern: he had rejected formal religion a long way back, during his battles with his father. ‘The further away from church I was, the better I felt,’ he wrote of his teenage self. ‘All religion bored me to death.’ But to Emma, raised in a conventional haut-bourgeois Swiss family, it was the church wedding that counted.

      They spent the days before setting off on their honeymoon on 2 March at Ölberg. Early that morning they were borne away in the green everyday Rauschenbach carriage piled high with labelled trunks and hat boxes, Emma’s mother and sister and the full complement of servants ranged on either side of the grand entrance, waving them off down the hill – ‘Wünsch Glück! Wünsch Glück!’ – past the fountain and the vineyards and on to Schaffhausen railway station and the start of their journey – Emma in her travelling outfit and furs, Carl with his new set of tailored clothes and plenty of books.

      After a short visit to Carl’s mother and sister at the Bottminger Mill in Basel they travelled by Continental Express to Paris. The first-class carriages were arranged much like a drawing room, with heavily upholstered seats, writing tables and lamps for reading and curtains at the windows. The restaurant car was elegant, the menus all in French and the food excellent. The night was spent in lavishly adorned salons lits, with hand basin and mirror in the corner and the two bunks made up with fine bedlinen. Stewards in smart uniforms appeared at any time of day or night at the ring of a bell, and there СКАЧАТЬ