London
London, June 8, 1888
To PASTOR ULLMER
I have received your kind and cherished letter of March 12, which was forwarded to me from the Philippines. I left my country the third of February. I travelled in China, Japan and the United States, and reached here at the end of last month. Here I shall probably remain a couple of years. I hope we may see one another next year. I will go to Belgium in search of a temporary home. After disembarking at Rotterdam, I will go up the Rhine, and come to visit you and your family with whom I have passed such sweet and delightful days.
I have left my country on account of my book. The Filipino public welcomed Noli Me Tangere very heartily: the edition is entirely exhausted. The Governor General [Terrero] summoned me and asked me for a copy of it. The friars were most excited. They wanted to persecute me, but they did not know how to get me. The Archbishop threatened to excommunicate me.
The story of my return (home) would be long to tell and hard to understand for those who do not know life in the Philippines. My family would not allow me to eat in any house, for fear they might poison me. Friends and enemies did me favors; the latter burned my books, the former paid as much as fifty pesos for one copy. The book stores have made [a] big profit, but I got nothing. The friars urged my exile, but the Governor replied that they would have to bring me before the court, if there was anything illegal that I had done. I left my country in order to give my relatives peace. I am at any rate once more in a free land, breathing the free air of Europe. My fellow countrymen consider me lucky to have escaped unharmed from the Philippines. I feel like the diver Schiller described, who said: “I have seen horrible things, monsters which menaced me with their talons; but by the help of God I am again on the surface!”
Nevertheless I will go back!
JOSE RIZAL
01-298 [Family]