One hundred years ago
A curious story comes from Pesth of a society of six lads, between sixteen and eighteen years of age, who agreed together to throw all their spare money into a common fund and spend it in a great carouse, after which they very naturally found themselves in straits, and came to the conclusion that they could not get out of the scrape better than by a collective act of suicide. For this purpose they had only a single six- chambered revolver. One of them, Rum- bauer, a wood-engraver of seventeen years of age, asked leave to begin, and shot himself in two places, inflicting very grave wounds which may prove mortal, but not killing himself. The spectacle of his physical anguish horrified four of the six, and they crept away to Pesth; while the sixth, Liszka, a musician and a boy of only sixteen, attempted to follow Rumbauer's example, but only inflicted on himself a slight wound, and was able to make his way to a friend's house, to whom he explained what had happened. If the intention of collective suicide had been serious, it would have been more easily attained by the use of a little dynamite; but the truth is that the pleasure-loving temperament which determines on such a mad course as this, is not the temperament best fitted to carry out the grim design of suicide, col- lective or otherwise. The lusts of the flesh are not ascetic, and do not fit men for suicide, or any other resolute inflic- tion of pain on one's own body.
Spectator, 9 June 1883
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