"Useless! I know what is destined."
Never had he been so colossal, so assured. His nerves seemed to have regained their tone. The night before the duel he slept like a tranquil child.
In the early morn, on the way to the field outside Geneva, he begged his second to arrange the duel on the French side of the frontier, so that he might remain in Geneva and settle his account with the father. At the word of command, "One!" Janko's shot rang out. Lassalle's was not a second later, but he had already received his death-wound.
He lay three days, dying in terrible agony, relieved only by copious opium. Between the spasms, surprise possessed his mind that his Will should have counted for nothing before the imperturbable march of the universe. "There will never be Justice for the People," he thought bitterly. "I was a dreamer. Heine was right. A mad world, my masters." But sometimes he had a gleam of suspicion that it was he that had lacked sanity. His Will had become mere wilfulness. In his love as in his crusade he had shut his eyes to the brute facts; had precipitated what could only be coaxed. "I die by my own hand," he said. If he had only married Rosalie Zander, who still lived on, loving him! These Russian and Bavarian minxes were neurotic, fickle, shifting as sand; the daughters of Judæa were sane, cheerful, solid. Then he thought of his own sister married to that vulgarian, Friedland. He saw her, a rosy-cheeked girl, sitting at the Passover table, with its picturesque ritual. How happy were those far-off pious days! And then he felt a cold wind, remembering how Riekchen had hidden her face to laugh at these mediæval mummeries, and to spit out the bitter herbs, so meaningless to her.
O terrible tragi-comedy of life, O strange, tangled world, in which poor, petty man must walk, tripped by endless coils—religion, race, sex, custom, wealth, poverty! World that from boyhood he had seemed to see stretching so clearly before him, to be mapped out with lucid logic, to be bestridden with triumphant foot by men become as gods, knowing good and evil.
Only one thing was left—to die unbroken.
He had his lawyer brought to his bedside, went through his last testament again, left money for the Union, recommended it to the workers as their one sure path of salvation. Moses had only been permitted to gaze upon the Promised Land, but the Chosen People—the Germans—should yet luxuriate in its milk and honey.
A month after his meeting with Helene on the Righi—a month after his glad shout, "By all the gods of Greece, 'tis she!"—he was a corpse, the magic voice silent for ever; while the woman he had sought was to give herself to his slayer, and the movement he had all but abandoned for her was to become a great power in the State, under the ever-growing glamour of his memory.
The Countess bent over the body. A strange, grim joy mingled with her rage and despair. None of all these women had the right to share in her grief. He belonged to her—to her and the People. Yes, she would bear the body of her cher enfant through the provinces of the Rhine—he had been murdered by a cunning political plot, the People who loved him should rise and avenge their martyred Messiah.
And suddenly she remembered with a fresh pang the one woman who had a right to share her grief, nay, to call him—in no figurative sense—"enfant"; the wrinkled old Jewess, palsied and deaf and peevish, who lived on in a world despoiled of his splendid fighting strength, of his superb fore-visionings.