Old Love Stories Retold | Page 5

reproaches her with having kept him
waiting in this way:
"Tear my sides, my chest, my face, with red-hot pincers, flay me alive,
shoot, stone me, rather than keep me waiting.
"With all imaginable torture, cruelly break my limbs, but do not keep
me waiting, for of all torments disappointed expectation is the most
painful. I expected thee all yesterday afternoon until six o'clock, but
thou didst not come, thou witch, and I grew almost mad. Impatience
encircled me like the folds of a viper, and I bounded on my couch at
every ring, but oh! mortal anguish, it did not bring thee. "Thou didst
fail to come; I fret, I fume, and Satanas whispered mockingly in my
ear--'The charming lotus-flower makes fun of thee, thou old fool!'"
"Camille Selden" made the mistake of her life when she imagined that
Heine loved her, and did not love that somewhat stout and
High-coloured Mme. Heine who had such bad taste in lace and
literature.
Mathilde, as we know, was far from being Heine's first love. She was
more important--his last. Heine himself tells us that from his boyhood
he had been dangerously susceptible to women. He had tried many
cures for the disease, but finally came to the conclusion that "woman is
the best antidote to woman", though--"to be sure, this is driving out
Satan with Beelzebub." There had been many loves in Heine's life
before, one day in the Quarrier Latin, somewhere in the year 1835, he
had met saucy, laughing Mathilde Crescence Mirat. There had been
"red Sefchen," the executioner's daughter, whose red hair as she wound
it round her throat fascinated Heine with its grim suggestion of blood.
There had been his cousin Amalie, whose marriage to another is said to
have been the secret spring of sorrow by which Heine's laughter was
fed. And there had been others, whose names--imaginary, maybe, in

that they were doubtless the imaginary names of real women--are
familiar to all readers of Heines poetry: Seraphine, Angelique, Diane,
Hortense, Clarisse, Emma, and so on.
But she is loved best who is loved last; and when, after those months of
delirious dissipation in Paris, which all too soon were to be so
exorbitantly paid for by years of suffering, Heine met Mathilde, there is
no doubt at all that Heine met his wife. His reminiscent fancy might
sentimentalize about his lost Amalie, but no one can read his letters, not
so much to, as about, Mathilde without realizing that he came as near to
loving her as a man of his temperament can come near to loving any
one.
Though, to begin with, they were not married in the conventional sense,
but "kept house" together in the fashion of the Quarter, there seems no
question that Heine was faithful to Mathilde--to whom in his letters to
his friends he always referred as his "wife"--and that their relation, in
everything but name, was a true marriage. Just before he met Mathilde,
Heine had written to his friend and publisher, Campe, that he was at
last sick to death of the poor pleasures which had held him too long. "I
believe," he writes, "that my soul is at last purified of all its dross;
henceforth my verses will be the more beautiful, my books the more
harmonious. At all events, I know this--that at the present moment
everything impure and vulgar fills me with positive disgust."
It was at this moment, disgusted with those common illusions miscalled
pleasure, that Heine met Mathilde, and was attracted by what one might
call the fresh elementalism of her nature. That his love began with that
fine intoxication of wonder and passion without which no love can
endure, this letter to his friend August Lewald will show: "How can I
apologize for not writing to you? And you are kind enough to offer me
the good excuse that your letter must have been lost. No, I will confess
the whole truth. I duly received it--but at a time when I was up to my
neck in a love affair that I have not yet got out of. Since October
nothing has been of any account with me that was not directly
connected with this. I have neglected everything, I see nobody, and
give a sigh whenever I think of my friends.... So I have often sighed to

think that you must misunderstand my silence, yet I could not fairly set
myself down to write. And that is all I can tell you today; for my
cheeks are in such a flame, and my brain reels so with the scent of
flowers, that I am in no condition to talk sensibly to you.
"Did you ever read King Solomon's Song? Just read it, and you will
there find all I could say today."