The Story of My Life from Childhood to Manhood | Page 4

My mother's likeness as a young woman accompanies these pages, and
must spare me the task of describing her appearance. It was copied
from the life-size portrait completed for the young husband by
Schadow just prior to his appointment as head of the Dusseldorf
Academy of Art, and now in the possession of my brother, Dr. Martin
Ebers of Berlin. Unfortunately, our copy lacks the colouring; and the
dress of the original, which shows the whole figure, confirms the
experience of the error committed in faithfully reproducing the fashion
of the day in portraits intended for future generations. It never fully
satisfied me; for it very inadequately reproduces what was especially
precious to us in our mother and lent her so great a charm--her feminine
grace, and the tenderness of heart so winningly expressed in her soft
blue eyes.
No one could help pronouncing her beautiful; but to me she was at
once the fairest and the best of women, and if I make the suffering
Stephanus in Homo Sum say, "For every child his own mother is the
best mother," mine certainly was to me. My heart rejoiced when I
perceived that every one shared this appreciation. At the time of my
birth she was thirty-five, and, as I have heard from many old
acquaintances, in the full glow of her beauty.
My father had been one of the Berlin gentlemen to whose spirit of
self-sacrifice and taste for art the Konigstadt Theater owed its
prosperity, and was thus brought into intimate relations with Carl von

Holtei, who worked for its stage both as dramatist and actor. When, as
a young professor, I told the grey-haired author in my mother's name
something which could not fail to afford him pleasure, I received the
most eager assent to my query whether he still remembered her. "How I
thank your admirable mother for inducing you to write!" ran the letter.
"Only I must enter a protest against your first lines, suggesting that I
might have forgotten her. I forget the beautiful, gentle, clever, steadfast
woman who (to quote Shakespeare's words) 'came adorned hither like
sweet May,' and, stricken by the hardest blows so soon after her
entrance into her new life, gloriously endured every trial of fate to
become the fairest bride, the noblest wife, most admirable widow, and
most faithful mother! No, my young unknown friend, I have far too
much with which to reproach myself, have brought from the conflicts
of a changeful life a lacerated heart, but I have never reached the point
where that heart ceased to cherish Fanny Ebers among the most sacred
memories of my chequered career. How often her loved image appears
before me when, in lonely twilight hours, I recall the past!"
Yes, Fate early afforded my mother an opportunity to test her character.
The city where shortly before my birth she became a widow was not
her native place. My father had met her in Holland, when he was
scarcely more than a beardless youth. The letter informing his relatives
that he had determined not to give up the girl his heart had chosen was
not regarded seriously in Berlin; but when the lover, with rare
pertinacity, clung to his resolve, they began to feel anxious. The eldest
son of one of the richest families in the city, a youth of nineteen,
wished to bind himself for life--and to a foreigner--a total stranger.
My mother often told us that her father, too, refused to listen to the
young suitor, and how, during that time of conflict, while she was with
her family at Scheveningen, a travelling carriage drawn by four horses
stopped one day before her parents' unpretending house. From this
coach descended the future mother-in-law. She had come to see the
paragon of whom her son had written so enthusiastically, and to learn
whether it would be possible to yield to the youth's urgent desire to
establish a household of his own. And she did find it possible; for the
girl's rare beauty and grace speedily won the heart of the anxious

woman who had really come to separate the lovers. True, they were
required to wait a few years to test the sincerity of their affection. But it
withstood the proof, and the young man, who had been sent to
Bordeaux to acquire in a commercial house the ability to manage his
father's banking business, did not hesitate an instant when his beautiful
fiancee caught the smallpox and wrote that her smooth face would
probably be disfigured by the malignant disease, but answered that
what he loved was not only her beauty but the purity and goodness of
her tender heart.
This had been a severe test, and it was to be rewarded: not the smallest
scar remained to recall the illness.