Old Love Stories Retold | Page 6

So wrote Heine at the beginning of his love. When that love had been
living for eight years, he was still writing in no less lover-like a fashion.
"My wife," says he to his brother Max in a letter dated April 12, 1843,
"is a good child--natural, gay, capricious, as only French women can be,
and she never allows me for one moment to sink into those melancholy
reveries for which I have so strong a disposition."
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,