A Nobel Affair: The Correspondence Between Alfred Nobel and Sofie Hess

Abstract

There is noNobel prize inMathematics, the urban legend goes, because a mathematician was the lover of Madame Nobel. But then most people know Alfred Nobel remained a bachelor until his death in 1896. What is less known is that there are envelopes addressed to a Madame Nobel in Alfred Nobel’s own writing. He maintained a long-term affair with a young Austrian woman, Sofie Hess. The affair between the forty-three-year-old wealthy vagabond of Europe and the twenty-six-year-old flower shop girl started in 1876 with all the traditional trimmings – endearing pet names, luxury gifts, meetings on Nobel’s business travels, and different apartments and places for Hess to stay, in Paris and elsewhere. Their epistolary exchanges continued long after their relationship had progressively soured, yielding a significant body of correspondence. The letters were deliberately kept hidden by those in charge of Nobel’s legacy and his first biographers, and when Hess threatened to sell the letters of her deceased lover, despite a significant sum left to her in Nobel’s will and her previous promise to destroy those letters, the lot was swiftly acquired by the Nobel Foundation to make sure this part of his life would remain in the shadows. They were not destroyed, though, and this is fortunate, even if scholars had to wait until 1976 to access this archive. For those curious about the love life of great men, Alfred Nobel’s case is rather disappointing. Apart from his mother, there are only two female figures who stand out: Bertha von Suttner and Sofie Hess. And with these two, it would be difficult to find more contrasting characters: one of noble descent, highly educated, mastering several foreign languages, politically engaged, and aiming to improve society; the other from the lower bourgeoisie, struggling to write in her own mother tongue, oblivious to the issues of her day, and unfocused even in her aim of being a high-maintenance kept woman, requesting large amounts of money, but not seizing opportunities for social or intellectual advancement through her benefactor’s tutelage. Von Suttner inspired Nobel’s idea for the Peace prize, while Hess seems to have passed through his life without leaving much of a trace. Yet Nobel corresponded with both, offering glimpses into hugely different aspects of his personality, and the image of himself he wanted to project. On that point, A Nobel Affair provides more insight into Nobel’s psychological and social difficulties than Edelgard Biedermann’s German edition of his correspondence with von Suttner. Because he plays less of a role on an imaginary stage when he writes to Sofie, Alfred appears more crippled in his anxiety and paranoia about his business and health, uncertain about his big projects and the path to take, often depressed, gradually more misanthropic, and definitely less of a gentleman and benefactor of humankind in his treatment of what he identifies as his lover’s deficiencies both in character and social provenance. Progressively he becomes suspicious of Sofie’s relatives, their intentions and bad influence (sometimes rightly so), patronising her thoughtless social behaviour which he found endearing at first, and showing himself quite judgmental and harsh in underlining her lack of writing style, her unrefined manners, and her greediness and profligate spending. Yet over the two decades of their exchanges, he remains devoted to her, covering her expenses and worrying for her health and whereabouts, despite her bearing the child of a man he induced her to marry in the hope that the father would care for the family. Eventually he breaks off all contact, forbidding Sofie to send any further letters following a financial arrangement set up by his lawyer.