had ever had any very serious romance in his life until he met Helene von Dönniges.
Es ist eine alte Geschichte,
Doch bleibt sie immer neu.—Heine.
II. Helene von Dönniges
Helene von Dönniges has told us the story in fullest detail—the story of that tragic love which was to send Lassalle to his too early death. She was the daughter of a Bavarian diplomatist who had held appointments in Italy, and later in Switzerland. She was betrothed as a child of twelve to an Italian of forty years of age. At a time when, as she says, her thoughts should have been concentrated upon her studies, they were distracted by speculations on marriage and the marriage tie. A young Wallachian student named Yanko Racowitza crossed her path. His loneliness—he was far from home and friends—kindled her sympathy. Dark and ugly, she compared him to Othello, and called him her “Moor.” In spite of some parental opposition she insisted upon plighting her troth to him, and the Italian lover was scornfully dismissed. Then comes
the opening scene of the present story. It was in Berlin, whither Helen—we will adopt the English spelling of the name—had travelled with her grandmother in 1862, that she was asked at a ball the momentous question, “Do you know Lassalle?” She had never heard his name. Her questioner was Baron Korff, a son-in-law of Meyerbeer, who, charmed by her originality, remarked that she and Lassalle were made for one another. Two weeks later her curiosity was further excited, when Dr. Karl Oldenberg let fall some similar remark as to her intellectual kinship with the mysterious Lassalle. She asked her grandmother about him, and was told that he was a “shameless demagogue.” Then she turned to her lover, who promised to inquire. Racowitza brought her information about the Countess, the casket, and other “sensations”—only to excite her curiosity the more. Finally a friend, Frau Hirsemenzel, undertook to introduce her to the notorious Socialist. The introduction took place at a party, and if her account is to be trusted, no romance could be more dramatic than the actuality. They loved one another at first sight, conversed with freedom,
and he called her by an endearing name as he offered her his arm to escort her home.
“Somehow it did not seem at all remarkable,” she says, “that a stranger should thus call me ‘Du’ on first acquaintance. We seemed to fit to one another so perfectly.”
She was in her nineteenth year, Lassalle in his thirty-ninth. The pair did not see one another again for some months, not in fact until Helen visited Berlin as the guest of a certain lawyer Holthoff. Here she met Lassalle at a concert, and the friendly lawyer connived at their being more than once together. At a ball, on one occasion, Lassalle asked her what she would do if he were sentenced to death, and she beheld him ascending the scaffold.
“I should wait till your head was severed,” was her answer, “in order that you might look upon your beloved to the last, and then—I should take poison.”
He was pleased with her reply, but declared that there was no fear—his star was in the ascendant! And so it seemed; for although young Racowitza even then accosted him in the ballroom, the friendly Holthoff soon arranged an