To Édouard Heckel   20 November 1877

Down, | Beckenham, Kent.

November 20th/77

Dear Sir

I thank you for your extremely kind & courteous letter. It would be the height of presumption in me to express any opinion of your French Translation, but as far as I could judge all seemed excellent.1 It would please me much to see a translation by you of the “Different Forms of Flowers”, but M. Reinwald informed me some little time since, that in the present political state of France he was afraid to bring out a Translation.— If you can get a Publisher, especially M. Reinwald, I shall be delighted.2

With much respect, | Dear Sir Yours faithfully | Charles Darwin

1
Heckel’s letter has not been found; he had translated Cross and self fertilisation into French (Heckel trans. 1877).
2
See letter from C.-F. Reinwald, 13 October 1877 and n. 4. Charles-Ferdinand Reinwald did publish Heckel’s translation of Forms of flowers (Heckel trans. 1878). Throughout November 1877, France was in the throes of a political crisis owing to disagreement between the newly elected and mostly pro-Republican Chamber of Deputies and the president, Marie Edmé Patrice Maurice de MacMahon; civil war seemed a possibility (Annual register (1877): 153–66).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

0.1 Down, | Beckenham, Kent.] above del ‘Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.’
1.3 by you] interl
1.5 especially] after del ‘I’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11242,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11242