“It was a little intrigue, you understand. They got my poor Mohammed to send for me and then laid that ambush. I see it all in a minute, and I think—this wants a little management.” Stein, an exile from the ranks of the failed 1848 German revolution, is speaking to Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim about the day he added a particularly rare butterfly to his entomology collection. He had just foiled the ambush—first playing possum then killing three assailants—when he spotted and captured a Coleoptera. “Yes, my good friend. On that day I had nothing to desire; I had greatly annoyed my principal enemy; I was young, strong; I had friendship; I had the love’ (he said ‘lof’) of woman, a child I had, to make my heart very full—and even what I had once dreamed in
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