- 121 -

count, your honour, be so kind as to come to your midday meal, if I may be so bold...Do you think, you fool, to steal time thus from God; ach, ah, just think, you man of no conscience, think while you have still a right-thinking bone in your body. At Judgement Day you will have to answer for it, you who have forsaken all honour, you good-for-nothing, you shameless, worthless one - shame on you in your very soul. Just wait, I will complain to the pastor, the neighbours and everyone; and either you'll have to let me leave or
you
must leave of your marvellous books"

In the final scene the rebellious wife is frightened into good behaviour by one of the neighbours dressed up as a ghost. And though Bräker can see his wife's point of view when she reproaches him, he is so revolted by her continual scolding that he too can descend into verbal abuse - though the words are not given to Fridli but to another neighbour:

"...How the foam hung on her lips, how her bosom heaved up to heaven! Her eyes glowed with fire - her teeth gnashed together and her voice goes through your very marrow! When she clenches her fists - poor husband! Heaven keep me from such a helpmate, even if she shits gold and pisses Tokay wine!" [Voellmy, v 2 pp 114-115]

In the same dialogue he hints that despite the scolding he is never going to give way:
"A wife won't tolerate a rival in love, and neither will the books". [Voellmy, v 2 p 118]

17th March Bräker laments his lot in a dialogue with his diary, to which he has not confided for some time his troubles and care, because of other distractions. He would prefer to complain to a doctor who "knows how to heal disorders of the spirit" [Chronik, pp 138-9]

24th March Voellmy (v 1 pp 14-15) quotes a letter written by a teacher called Johannes Graf of Canton Appenzell to his friend Dr Johannes Georg Anstein, in Chur. He had made a journey through the Toggenburg and mentions libraries at Lichtensteig and Herisau, also "Nappis Uly": "...He has had for some years an irresistible inclination to reading, and all the moments that he can steal from his work and his bad-tempered wife he spends therein, and now he is beginning to write on the subjects that the said reading-society has laid before its members. He has already twice won the prize for this. Herr Doktor Hirzel in Zurich admires his facility in writing dialogues, and says he is now ashamed of his philosophical farmer [...], the local councillors [Landrathe] and the clergy have reason to fear him."
[This shows that Bräker was already becoming known outside his immediate neighbourhood, and in spite of his dire financial position. Hirzel was a very widely read author, known for his promotion of the "scientific farmer" Jakob Gujer.]


6th Apr. Bräker has sent one of his dialogues to a friend, who returns the comment that his problems are more likely to be solved by working harder than by writing. But "even if I should end up going begging, yet I would take Gessner's Idylls and my pencil and a sheet of paper, and sit there on a sunny bank and unburden my heart." [Chronik, p 139]

But on 11th September, after a particularly brutal encounter with an irate creditor, his usual means of consolation failed him and he came close to being overwhelmed by despair.

Autobiography 73 (continued):

"One day, when I had been running about trying in vain to borrow a few guilders, one of my creditors had addressed me with dreadful incivility, and everything was going with me from bad to worse - I came home quite melancholy, and as usual could not say yea or nay to my wife unless I wanted to swallow down a hundred bitter reproaches - I thought, as so often before, of taking refuge in my writing, but I could bring forth nothing but confused laments which bordered almost on blasphemy. Then I tried to calm myself by reading a good book, and in that too I failed. So I went to bed, tossed upon my pillows till midnight, and let my thoughts roam far and wide over the whole world. Soon my late father came to mind: "Your life too, you good man", thought I, "passed like mine in nothing but care and grief, which I, alas! increased upon you not a


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