The misfortunes of war completed the ruin of her purse and her health. She assisted her countrymen by collecting contributions, and when money failed, she paid with personal exertions, fulfilling the admirable precept, "When you have given everything, give yourself." The vehemence of her feelings exhausted her strength, and her frail health gave way beneath the excess of privation and fatigue. She fell ill, and was forced to keep her bed for three months.
Her resources were exhausted, and poverty approached with great strides. She decided to ask one of her brothers, who was rich, to send her a little money; but he not only refused, but took a cruel pleasure in taunting the poor girl, with what he called her crazy liberality.
For six months the war intercepted all communications, so that she could receive no tidings of him whom she still called her betrothed. But this anxiety was the last. On waking one morning Rahel saw a letter which had just been brought in, and by a sudden inspiration, worthy of one who had never despaired, she guessed what this note contained: "a living hope, which never dies out in valiant souls, cried out that at last she had grasped happiness;" and the hope proved true: ten days later she married August Varnhagen, who having recovered from his hesitation, fulfilled his vows with a good will.
"You will never repent marrying me," she wrote to him, with naïveté, a little while before her marriage; "Love me, or love me not, as God wills; whatever happens I shall be yours for ever, you can rely on me: I am constant, as you have been constant. Rahel shall never fail you."
Her husband was afterward made Prussian minister, and Rahel as ambassadress was once more surrounded as in the pleasantest days of her youth.
She was sixty-two years old when the disease attacked her of which she died. Varnhagen never left her, or ceased trying to make her forget her sufferings by reading the books to her which she loved best; and Heinrich Heine, learning that she was ordered to apply fresh rose-leaves to her inflamed eyes, sent her his first poems, lying at the bottom of a basket of exquisite roses.
Madame von Varnhagen had always loved the Bible, and, especially, Jewess though she was, the New Testament. She was never tired of listening to the history of the sufferings and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. One day finding herself more feeble, she said, taking her husband's hand and pressing it on her heart: "I feel better, my friend. I have been thinking a long time of Jesus, and it seems as if I had never felt as at this moment how truly He is my brother, and the brother of all men. It has comforted me." . . . These were her last words.
Do these women explain the women of our times? It is at least disputable; but we must recognize in them three interesting characters. We will not try to compare them; the differences between them are self-evident; and certainly though Eugénie de Guérin, the Frenchwoman and the Catholic, played in a worldly sense the most obscure part, no person of elevated views can contest the fact that hers was the most beautiful life of the three.