We ought not to be surprised, then, if he was a favorite in drawing-rooms; if both men and women admired him; if Alexander von Humboldt cried out with enthusiasm that he was a wunderkind, and if there were more than Sophie Solutzeff to be jealous. But the rather ungrateful remark of the Countess von Hatzfeldt certainly does not represent him as he really was.
"You are without reason and judgment where women are concerned," she snarled at him; but the sneer only shows that the woman who uttered it was neither in love with him nor grateful to him.
In this paper we are not discussing Lassalle as a public agitator or as a Socialist, but simply in his relations with the two women who most seriously affected his life. The first was the Countess von Hatzfeldt, who, as we have seen, occupied—or rather wasted—nine of the best years of his life. Then came that profound and thrilling passion which ended the career of a man who at thirty-nine had only just begun to be famous.
Lassalle had joined his intellectual forces with those of Heine and Marx. He had obtained so great an influence over the masses of the people as to alarm many a monarch, and at the same time to attract many a statesman. Prince Bismarck, for example, cared nothing for Lassalle's championship of popular rights, but sought his aid on finding that he was an earnest advocate of German unity.
Furthermore, he was very far from resembling what in those early days was regarded as the typical picture of a Socialist. There was nothing frowzy about him; in his appearance he was elegance itself; his manners were those of a prince, and his clothing was of the best. Seeing him in a drawing-room, no one would mistake him for anything but a gentleman and a man of parts. Hence it is not surprising that his second love was one of the nobility, although her own people hated Lassalle as a bearer of the red flag.
This girl was Helene von Donniges, the daughter of a Bavarian diplomat. As a child she had traveled much, especially in Italy and in Switzerland. She was very precocious, and lived her own life without asking the direction of any one. At twelve years of age she had been betrothed to an Italian of forty; but this dark and pedantic person always displeased her, and soon afterward, when she met a young Wallachian nobleman, one Yanko Racowitza, she was ready at once to dismiss her Italian lover. Racowitza—young, a student, far from home, and lacking friends—appealed at once to the girl's sympathy.
At that very time, in Berlin, where Helene was visiting her grandmother, she was asked by a Prussian baron:
"Do you know Ferdinand Lassalle?"
The question came to her with a peculiar shock. She had never heard the name, and yet the sound of it gave her a strange emotion. Baron Korff, who perhaps took liberties because she was so young, went on to say:
"My dear lady, have you really never seen Lassalle? Why, you and he were meant for each other!"