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!"
She felt ashamed to ask about him, but shortly after a gentleman who knew her said:
"It is evident that you have a surprising degree of intellectual kinship with Ferdinand Lassalle."
This so excited her curiosity that she asked her grandmother:
"Who is this person of whom they talk so much—this Ferdinand Lassalle?"
"Do not speak of him," replied her grandmother. "He is a shameless demagogue!"