Too Much Happiness

Darkness already, snow falling, without any wind, the street-lamps enlarged like Christmas globes. She looked around for a cab but did not see one. An omnibus was passing and she waved it down. The driver informed her that this was not a scheduled stop.

“But you stopped,” she said without concern.

She did not know the streets of Stockholm at all well, so it was some time later that she realized she had been travelling into the wrong part of town. She laughed as she explained this to the driver, and he let her off to walk home through the snow in her party dress and her light cloak and slippers. The pavements were wonderfully silent and white. She had to walk about a mile, but was pleased to discover that she knew the way, after all. Her feet were soaked but she was not cold. She thought this was because of the lack of wind, and the enchantment in her mind and body that she had never been aware of before, but could certainly count on from now on. It might be quite unoriginal to say so, but the city was like a city in a fairy tale.

The next day she stayed in bed, and sent a note to her colleague Mittag-Leffler asking him to get her his doctor, as she had none. He came himself as well, and during a long visit she talked to him with great excitement about a new mathematical work she was pla

The doctor thought that the problem was with her kidneys, and left her some medicine.

“I forgot to ask him,” Sophia said when he had gone.

“Ask him what?” said Mittag-Leffler.

“Is there plague? In Copenhagen?”

“You’re dreaming,” said Mittag-Leffler gently. “Who told you that?”

“A blind man,” she said. Then she said, “No, I meant kind. Kind man.” She waved her hands about, as if trying to make some shape that would fit better than words. “My Swedish,” she said.

“Wait to speak until you are better.”

She smiled and then looked sad. She said with emphasis, “My husband.”

“Your betrothed? Ah, he is not your husband yet. I am teasing you. Would you like him to come?”

But she shook her head. She said, “Not him. Bothwell.

“No. No. No,” she said rapidly. “The other.”

“You must rest.”

Teresa Gulden and her daughter Elsa had come, also Ellen Key. They were to take turns nursing her. After Mittag-Leffler had gone she slept awhile. When she woke she was talkative again but did not mention a husband. She talked about her novel, and about the book of recollections of her youth at Palibino. She said she could do something much better now and started to describe her idea for a new story. She became confused and laughed because she was not doing this more clearly. There was a movement back and forth, she said, there was a pulse in life. Her hope was that in this piece of writing she would discover what went on. Something underlying. Invented, but not.

What could she mean by this? She laughed.

She was overflowing with ideas, she said, of a whole new breadth and importance and yet so natural and self-evident that she couldn’t help laughing.

She was worse on Sunday. She could barely speak, but insisted on seeing Fufu in the costume that she was going to wear to a children’s party.

It was a Gypsy costume, and Fufu danced in it, around her mother’s bed.

On Monday Sophia asked Teresa Gulden to look after Fufu.

That evening she felt better, and a nurse came in to give Teresa and Ellen a rest.

In the early hours of the morning Sophia woke. Teresa and Ellen were wakened from sleep and they roused Fufu that the child might see her mother alive one more time. Sophia could speak just a little.

Teresa thought she heard her say, “Too much happiness.”

She died around four o’clock. The autopsy would show her lungs completely ravaged by pneumonia and her heart displaying trouble which went back several years. Her brain, as everybody expected, was large.

The doctor from Bornholm read of her death in the newspaper, without surprise. He had occasional presentiments, disturbing to one in his profession, and not necessarily reliable. He had thought that avoiding Copenhagen might preserve her. He wondered if she had taken the drug he had given her, and if it had brought her solace, as it did, when necessary, to him.

Sophia Kovalevsky was buried in what was then called the New Cemetery, in Stockholm, at three o’clock in the afternoon of a still cold day when the breath of mourners and onlookers hung in clouds on the frosty air.

A wreath of laurel came from Weierstrass. He had said to his sisters that he knew he would never see her again.

He lived for six more years.

Maksim came from Beaulieu, summoned by Mittag-Leffler’s telegram before her death. He arrived in time to speak at the funeral, in French, referring to Sophia rather as if she had been a professor of his acquaintance, and thanking the Swedish nation on behalf of the Russian nation for giving her a chance to earn her living (to use her knowledge in a worthy ma

Maksim did not marry. He was allowed after some time to return to his homeland, to lecture in Petersburg. He founded the Party for Democratic Reform in Russia, taking a stand for constitutional monarchy. The czarists found him much too liberal. Lenin, however, denounced him as a reactionary.

Fufu practiced medicine in the Soviet Union, dying there in the mid-fifties of the twentieth century. She had no interest in mathematics, so she said.

Sophia’s name has been given to a crater on the moon.

Acknowledgments

I discovered Sophia Kovalevsky (“Too Much Happiness”) while searching for something else in the Brita