Old Love Stories Retold

by Richard Le Gallienne

When Heine wrote this letter, Mathilde had been his "legal" wife for something like a year and a half. Heine had resorted to the formalizing of their union under the pressure of one of those circumstances which compel a man to think more of a woman than of an idea. He was going to fight a duel with one of his and her cowardly German traducers, and that there should be no doubt of her position in the event of his death, he duly married her. Writing to his friend Lewald once more, on the 13th of October, 1841, he says: "You will have learned that, a few days before the duel, to make Mathilde's position secure, I felt it right to turn my free marriage into a lawful one. This conjugal duel, which will never cease till the death of one or the other of us, is far more perilous than any brief meeting with a Solomon Straus of Jew Lane, Frankfort."

His friend Campe had been previously advised of "my marriage with the lovely and honest creature who has lived by my side for years as Mathilde Heine; was always respected and looked upon as my wife, and was defiled by foul names only by some scandal-loving Germans of the Frankfort clique."

Heine's duel resulted in nothing more serious than a flesh-wound on the hip. But alas! the wild months of dissipation before he had met Mathilde were before long to be paid for by that long, excruciating suffering which is one of the most heroic spectacles in the history of literature. It is the paradox of the mocker that he often displays the virtues and sentiments which he mocks, much more manfully than the professional sentimentalist. Courage and laughter are old friends, and Heine's laughter—his later laughter, at least—was perhaps mostly courage. If for no other reason, one would hope for a hereafter—so that Charles II and Heine may have met and compared notes upon dying. Heine was indeed an "unconscionable long time a-dying," but then he died with such brilliant patience, with such good humour, and, in the meanwhile, contrived to write such haunting poetry, such saturnine criticism.

And, all the time, during those ten years of dying, his faithful "Treasure" was by his side. The people who "understood" him better, who read his books and delighted in his genius, somehow or other seemed to forget the lonely Prometheus on the mattress-rock at No. 3 Avenue Matignon. It was 1854 when Heine was painfully removed there. It was so long ago as the May of 1848 that he had walked out for the last time. His difficult steps had taken him to the Louvre, and, broken in body and nerves—but never in spirit—he had burst into tears before the Venus of Milo. It was a characteristic pilgrimage—though it was only a "Mouche" who could have taken Heine seriously when he said that he loved only statues and dead women. There was obviously a deep strain of the macabre and the bizarre in Heine's nature; but it must never be forgotten that he loved his Mathilde as well.

That Heine was under no illusion about Mathilde, his letters show. He would laugh at her on occasion, and even be a little bitter; but if we are not to laugh at those we love, whom are we to laugh at? So, at all events, thought Heine. Superior people might wonder that a man with Heine's "intellect," et cetera, could put up, day after day, with a little bourgeoise like Mathilde. But Heine might easily have retorted: "Where anywhere in the world are you going to find me a woman who is my equal, who is my true mate? You will bring me cultivated governesses, or titled ladies who preside over salons, or anemic little literary women with their imitative verse or their amateurish political dreams. No, thank you. I am a man. I am a sick, sad man. I need a kind, beautiful woman to love and take care of me. She must be beautiful, remember, as well as kind— and she must be not merely a nurse, hut a woman I can love. If she shouldn't understand my writings, what does it matter? We don't marry a wife for that. I am not looking for some little patronizing blue-stocking—who, in her heart, thinks herself a better writer than myself—but for a simple woman of the elements, no more learned than a rose, and as meaningless, if you will, as the rising moon."

Just such a woman Heine found in his Mathilde, and it is to be remembered that for years before the illness which left him, so to speak, at her mercy, he had loved and been faithful to her. There are letters which seem to show that Mathilde had the defects of those qualities of buxom light-heartedness, of eternal sunshine, which had kept a fickle Heine so faithful. Sometimes, one gathers, she as little realized the tragedy of Heine's suffering as she understood his writings. As such a woman must, she often left Heine very lonely; and seemed to feel more for her cat, or her parrot "Cocotte," than her immortal, dying husband.

"Oh, what a night we have had!" Heine exclaimed one day to his friend Meissner. "I have not been able to close an eye. We have had an accident in our house; the cat fell from the mantelpiece and scratched her right ear; it even bled a little. That gave us great sorrow. My good Mathilde remained up and applied cold poultices to the cat all night long. For me she never remains awake."

And another time, he said, even more bitterly, to another friend: "I felt rather anxious yesterday. My wife had finished her toilet as early as two o'clock and had gone to take a drive. She promised to be back at four o'clock. It struck half-past five and she had not got back yet. The clock struck eight and my anxiety increased. Had she, perhaps, got tired of her sick husband and eloped with a cunning seducer? In my painful doubt I sent the sick-nurse to her chamber to see whether 'Cocotte' the parrot was still there. Yes, 'Cocotte' was still there. That set me at ease again, and I began to breathe more freely. Without 'Cocotte' the dear woman would never go away."

A great man like Heine must necessarily have such moods about a little woman like Mathilde; but the important fact remains that for some twenty years Heine was Mathilde's faithful husband, and that the commonplace, pretty, ignorant, pleasure-loving, bourgeoise Mathilde was good and faithful to a crippled, incomprehensible mate. Perhaps, after all, the wonder in this marriage is even more on the side of Mathilde than of Heine. Think what such a woman must have had to forego, to suffer, to "put up with," with such a man—a man, remember, whose real significance must have been Chinese to her. Surely, all of us who truly love love by faith, and the love of Heine for Mathilde, and of Mathilde for Heine, alike is only to be explained by that mysterious explanation—faith.

That Heine understood his love for Mathilde, so far as any man of genius can understand his love, and was satisfied with it so far as any man of genius can be with any love, we may be quite sure. His many letters about her, and to her, prove it. All the elemental simplicities of her nature—the very bourgeoise traits which made his friends wonder—alike interested him, and drew him closer toward her. When she weaves a rug for his friend Lewald, how seriously he takes it! He could laugh at all things in heaven and earth, but when Mathilde weaves a rug for his friend he takes life seriously.