Chapter 9

VII. THE PRIVATE LIFE OF FERDINAND LASSALLE {185}

Ich habe die Inventur meines Lebens gemacht. Es war gross, brav, wacker, tapfer und glanzend genug. Eine kunftige Zeit wird mir gerecht zu warden wissen.

--FERDINAND LASSALLE, _August_ 9, 1864.

I. The Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt.

Ferdinand Lassalle was born at Breslau on April 11, 1825. His parents were of Jewish race, his father a successful silk merchant. From boyhood he was now the tyrant, now the slave of a mother whom he loved and by whom he was adored. Heymann Lassal--his son changed the spelling during his Paris sojourn--appears to have been irritable and tyrannical; and there are some graphic instances in the recently published "Diary" {186} of the differences between them, ending on one occasion in the boy rushing to the river, where his terrified father finds him hesitating on the brink, and becomes reconciled. A more attractive picture of the old man is that told of his visit to his son-in-law, Friedland, who had married Lassalle's sister. Friedland was ashamed of his Jewish origin, and old Lassalle startled the guests at dinner by rising and frankly stating that he was a Jew, that his daughter was a Jewess, and that her husband was of the same race. The guests cheered, but the host never forgave his too frank father-in-law.

Lassalle was a student at Breslau University, and later at Berlin, where he laid the foundation of those Hegelian studies to which he owed his political philosophy. In 1845 he went to Paris, and there secured the friendship of Heine, being included with George Sand in the interesting circle around the "mattress grave" of the sick poet.

Among Heine's letters {187} there are four addressed to Lassalle, now as "Dear and best beloved friend," now as "Dearest brother-in-arms." "Be assured," he says, "that I love you beyond measure. I have never before felt so much confidence in any one." "I have found in no one," he says again, "so much passion and clearness of intellect united in action. You have good right to be audacious--we others only usurp this Divine right, this heavenly privilege." And to Varnhagen von Ense he writes:--

My friend, Herr Lassalle, who brings you this letter, is a young man of the most remarkable intellectual gifts. With the most thorough erudition, with the widest learning, with the greatest penetration that I have ever known, and with the richest gift of exposition, he combines an energy of will and a capacity for action which astonish me. . . . In no one have I found united so much enthusiasm and practical intelligence.

"In every line," says Brandes, "this letter shows the far-seeing student of life, indeed, the prophet!"

Lassalle is not backward in reciprocating the enthusiasm.

"I love Heine," he declares; "he is my second self. What audacity! what crushing eloquence! He knows how to whisper like a zephyr when it kisses rose-blooms, how to breathe like fire when it rages and destroys; he calls forth all that is tenderest and softest, and then all that is fiercest and most daring. He has the command of all the range of feeling."

Lassalle's sympathy with Heine never lessened. It was Heine who lost grasp of the intrinsically higher nature of his countryman and co-religionist, and an acute difference occurred, as we shall see, when Lassalle interfered in the affairs of the Countess von Hatzfeldt. Introduced to the Countess by his friend Dr. Mendelssohn, in 1846, Lassalle felt that here in concrete form was scope for all his enthusiasm of humanity, and he determined to devote his life to championing the cause of the oppressed lady. {188} The Countess was the wife of a wealthy and powerful nobleman, who ill-treated her shamefully. He imprisoned her in his castles, refused her doctors and medicine in sickness, and carried off her children. Her own family, as powerful as the Count, had often intervened, and the Count's repentances were many but short-lived. In 1846 matters reached a crisis. The Count wrote to his second son, Paul, asking him to leave his mother. The boy carried this letter to the Countess; and Lassalle relates that, finding the lady in tears, he persuaded her to a full disclosure of the facts. He pledged himself to save her, and for nine years carried on the struggle, with ultimate victory, but with considerable loss of reputation. He first told the story to Mendelssohn and Oppenheim, two friends of great wealth, the latter a Judge of one of the superior courts in Prussia. They agreed to help him; for then, as always, Lassalle's persuasive powers were irresistible. They went with him from Berlin to Dusseldorf, the Count being in that neighbourhood. Von Hatzfeldt was at Aix-la-Chapelle, caught in the toils of a new mistress, the Baroness Meyendorff. Lassalle discovered that she had obtained from the Count a deed assigning to her some property which should in the ordinary course have come to the boy Paul. The Countess, hearing of the disaster which seemed likely to befall her favourite son, made her way into her husband's presence, and in the scene which followed secured a promise that the document should be revoked--destroyed. But no sooner had she left him than the Count returned to the Meyendorff influence, and refused to see his wife again. Soon afterwards it was discovered that the woman had set out for Cologne. Lassalle begged his friends Oppenheim and Mendelssohn, to follow her and, if possible, to ascertain whether the momentous document had actually been destroyed. They obeyed, and reached the hotel at Cologne about the same time as the Baroness. Here they were guilty of an indiscretion, if of nothing worse, for which Lassalle can surely in no way be blamed, but which was used for many a year to tarnish his name. Oppenheim, on his way upstairs, observed a servant with the luggage of the Baroness; among other things a desk or casket of a kind commonly used to carry valuable papers. Thinking only of the fact that it was desirable to obtain a certain document from the brutal Count, he pounced upon the casket when the servant's back was turned. But he had no luggage with him in which to conceal it, and so handed it to Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn, although fully sensible of the blunder that had been committed, could not desert his friend, and placed the casket in his trunk.

The whole hotel was in an uproar when the Baroness discovered her loss. The friends fled panic-stricken in opposite directions. Suspicion immediately fell upon Dr. Mendelssohn, because his room was seen to have been left in confusion. He was pursued, but succeeded in escaping from a railway carriage and fleeing to Paris, leaving his luggage in the hands of the police. In his box some papers were found which incriminated Oppenheim; and Oppenheim, a Judge of one of the superior courts, and the son of a millionaire, was arrested and imprisoned for theft!

Lassalle visited Oppenheim in prison, and extracted from him a promise of silence as to the motive for his conduct. He then threw himself vigorously into the struggle, both in the press and in the law courts. Here he seems to have parted company with Heine, because, as he tells us, "the Baroness Meyendorff was a friend of the Princess de Lieven, and the Princess de Lieven was the mistress of Guizot, and Heine received a pension from Guizot."

Oppenheim was acquitted in 1846, and Mendelssohn, who was really innocent of the actual robbery, naturally thought it safe to return to Germany. He was, however, tried before the assize court of Cologne, and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. Alexander von Humboldt obtained a reduction of the sentence to one year, but on condition that Mendelssohn should leave Europe. He went, after his release from prison, to Constantinople, and when the Crimean war broke out joined the Turkish army, dying on the march in 1854.

Meanwhile Germany rang for many years with the story of the so-called robbery, and Lassalle's name was even more associated therewith than were those of his more culpable friends. And this was not unnatural, because he was engaged year after year in continuous warfare with Count Hatzfeldt. At length, in 1854, about the time that the unfortunate Dr. Mendelssohn died in the East, he secured for the Countess complete separation and an ample provision.

Lassalle's friendship with this lady inevitably gave rise to scandal. But never surely was scandal so little justified. She was twenty years his senior, and the relation was clearly that of mother and son. In her letters he is always "my dear child," and in his she is the confidante of the innumerable troubles of mind and of heart of which so impressionable a man as Ferdinand Lassalle had more than his share.

"You are without reason and judgment where women are concerned," she tells him, when he confides to her his passion for Helene von Donniges; and the remark opens out a vista of confidences of which the world happily knows but little. From the assize court of Dusseldorf, of all places, we have a very definite glimpse of a good-looking man, likely to be a favourite in the society of the opposite sex:--

"Ferdinand Lassalle," runs the official document, "aged twenty-three, a civilian, born at Breslau, and dwelling recently at Berlin. Stands five feet six inches in height, has brown curly hair, open forehead, brown eyebrows, dark blue eyes, well proportioned nose and mouth, and rounded chin."

He was indeed a favourite in Berlin drawing-rooms, pronounced a "Wunderkind" by Humboldt, and enthusiastically admired on all sides. But, assuming the story of Sophie Solutzeff to be mythical, there is no evidence that Lassalle had ever had any very serious romance in his life until he met Helene von Donniges.

_Es ist eine alte Geschichte_, _Doch bleibt sie immer neu_.--HEINE.

II. Helene von Donniges

Helene von Donniges has told us the story in fullest detail--the story of that tragic love which was to send Lassalle to his too early death. She was the daughter of a Bavarian diplomatist who had held appointments in Italy, and later in Switzerland. She was betrothed as a child of twelve to an Italian of forty years of age. At a time when, as she says, her thoughts should have been concentrated upon her studies, they were distracted by speculations on marriage and the marriage tie. A young Wallachian student named Yanko Racowitza crossed her path. His loneliness--he was far from home and friends--kindled her sympathy. Dark and ugly, she compared him to Othello, and called him her "Moor." In spite of some parental opposition she insisted upon plighting her troth to him, and the Italian lover was scornfully dismissed. Then comes the opening scene of the present story. It was in Berlin, whither Helen--we will adopt the English spelling of the name--had travelled with her grandmother in 1862, that she was asked at a ball the momentous question, "Do you know Lassalle?" She had never heard his name. Her questioner was Baron Korff, a son-in-law of Meyerbeer, who, charmed by her originality, remarked that she and Lassalle were made for one another. Two weeks later her curiosity was further excited, when Dr. Karl Oldenberg let fall some similar remark as to her intellectual kinship with the mysterious Lassalle. She asked her grandmother about him, and was told that he was a "shameless demagogue." Then she turned to her lover, who promised to inquire. Racowitza brought her information about the Countess, the casket, and other "sensations"--only to excite her curiosity the more. Finally a friend, Frau Hirsemenzel, undertook to introduce her to the notorious Socialist. The introduction took place at a party, and if her account is to be trusted, no romance could be more dramatic than the actuality. They loved one another at first sight, conversed with freedom, and he called her by an endearing name as he offered her his arm to escort her home.

"Somehow it did not seem at all remarkable," she says, "that a stranger should thus call me 'Du' on first acquaintance. We seemed to fit to one another so perfectly."

She was in her nineteenth year, Lassalle in his thirty-ninth. The pair did not see one another again for some months, not in fact until Helen visited Berlin as the guest of a certain lawyer Holthoff. Here she met Lassalle at a concert, and the friendly lawyer connived at their being more than once together. At a ball, on one occasion, Lassalle asked her what she would do if he were sentenced to death, and she beheld him ascending the scaffold.

"I should wait till your head was severed," was her answer, "in order that you might look upon your beloved to the last, and then--I should take poison."

He was pleased with her reply, but declared that there was no fear--his star was in the ascendant! And so it seemed; for although young Racowitza even then accosted him in the ballroom, the friendly Holthoff soon arranged an informal betrothal; and Lassalle was on the eve of a great public triumph which seemed more likely to take him to the throne than to the scaffold.

To many this will seem an exaggeration. Yet hear Prince Bismarck in the Reichstag seventeen years after Lassalle's death:--

He was one of the most intellectual and gifted men with whom I have ever had intercourse, a man who was ambitious in high style, but who was by no means Republican: he had very decided national and monarchical sympathies, and the idea which he strove to realize was the German Empire, and therein we had a point of contact. Lassalle was extremely ambitious, and it was perhaps a matter of doubt to him whether the German Empire would close with the Hohenzollern dynasty or the Lassalle dynasty; but he was monarchical through and through. Lassalle was an energetic and very intellectual man, to talk with whom was very instructive. Our conversations lasted for hours, and I was always sorry when they came to an end. {198}

The year 1864, which was to close so tragically, opened indeed with extraordinary promise. Lassalle left Berlin in May--Helen had gone back to Geneva two or three months earlier--travelling by Leipzig and Cologne through the Rhenish provinces, and holding a "glorious review" the while.

"I have never seen anything like it," he writes to the Countess von Hatzfeldt. "The entire population indulged in indescribable jubilation. The impression made upon me was that such scenes must have attended the founding of new religions."

And it appeared possible that Heine's description of Lassalle as the Messiah of the nineteenth century was to be realized. The Bishop of Mayence was on his side, and the King of Prussia sympathetic. As he passed from town to town the whole population turned out to do him honour. Countless thousands met him at the stations: the routes were ornamented with triumphal arches, the houses decorated with wreaths, and flowers were thrown upon him as he passed. As the cavalcade approached the town of Ronsdorf, for example, it was easy to see that the people were on tip-toe with expectation. At the entrance an arch bore the inscription:--

Willkommen dem Dr. Ferdinand Lassalle Viel tausendmal im Ronsdorfer Thal!

Under arches and garlands, smothered with flowers thrown by young work- girls, whose fathers, husbands, brothers, cheered again and again, Lassalle and his friends entered the town, while a vast multitude followed in procession. It was at Ronsdorf that Lassalle made the speech which had in it something of fateful presentiment:--

"I have not grasped this banner," he said, "without knowing quite clearly that I myself may fall. The feelings which fill me at the thought that I may be removed cannot be better expressed than in the words of the Roman poet:

'_Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor_!'

or in German, '_Moge_, _wenn ich beseitigt werde_, _irgend ein Racher und Nachfolger aus meinen Gebeinen auferstehen_!' May this great and national movement of civilization not fall with my person, but may the conflagration which I have kindled spread farther and farther, so long as one of you still breathes. Promise me that, and in token raise your right hands."

All hands were raised in silence, and the impressive scene closed with a storm of acclamation.

But Lassalle was worn out, and he fled for a time from the storm and conflict to Switzerland. Helen at Geneva heard of his sojourn at Righi- Kaltbad, and she made an excursion thither with two or three friends, and thus on July 25 (1864) the lovers met again. An account of their romantic interview comes to us in Helen's own diary and in the letter which Lassalle wrote to the Countess Hatzfeldt two days later. Helen tells how they climbed the Kulm together, discussing by the way the question of their marriage and the possibility of opposition.

"What have your parents against me?" asked Lassalle; and was told that only once had she mentioned his name before them, and that their horror of the Jew agitator had ever since closed her mouth. So the conversation sped. The next morning their hope of "a sunrise" was destroyed by a fog. "How often," says Helen, "when in later years I have stood upon the summit of the Righi and seen the day break in all its splendour, have I recalled this foggy, damp morning, and Lassalle's disappointment!"

As he looked upon her, so pale and trembling, he abused the climate, and promised that he would give up politics, devote himself to science and literature, and take her to Egypt or India. He talked to her of the Countess, "who will think only of my happiness," and he talked of religion. Was his Jewish faith against him in her eyes? Mahommedanism and Judaism, it was all one to her, was the answer, but paganism by preference! They parted, to correspond immediately, and Lassalle to write to the astonished, and in this affair, unsympathetic Countess, of the meeting with his beloved. With the utmost friendliness, however, he endeavoured to keep the elder lady at a distance for a time.

On July 20 Helen writes to him, repeating her promise to become his wife.

You said to me yesterday: "Say but a sensible and decided 'Yes'--_et je me charge du reste_." Good; I say "Yes"--_chargez-vous donc du reste_. I only require that we first do all in our power to win my parents to a friendly attitude. To me belongs, however, a painful task. I must slay in cold blood the true heart of Yanko von Racowitza, who has given me the purest love, the noblest devotion. With heartless egotism I must destroy the day-dream of a noble youth. But for your sake I will even do what is wrong.

Meanwhile Lassalle's unhappy attempts to conciliate the Countess continue. He writes of Helen's sympathy and dwells upon her entire freedom from jealousy. He tells Frau von Hatzfeldt how much Helen is longing to see his old friend. In conclusion, as though not to show himself too blind a lover, he remarks that Helen's one failing is a total lack of will. "When, however, we are man and wife," he adds, "then shall I have 'will' enough for both, and she will be as clay in the hands of the potter." The Countess continues obdurate, and in a further letter (Aug. 2) Lassalle says:--

It is really a piece of extraordinary good fortune that, at the age of thirty-nine and a half, I should be able to find a wife so beautiful, so sympathetic, who loves me so much, and who--an indispensable requirement--is so entirely absorbed in my personality.

At Lassalle's request, Helen herself wrote thus to the Baroness von Hatzfeldt:--

DEAR AND BELOVED COUNTESS,--

Armed with an introduction from my lord and master, I, his affianced wife, come to you--unhappily only in writing--_le coeur et la main ouverte_, and beg of you a little of that friendship which you have given to him so abundantly. How deeply do I regret that your illness separates us, that I cannot tell you face to face how much I love and honour him, how ardently I long for your help and advice as to how I can best make my beautiful and noble eagle happy. This my first letter must necessarily seem somewhat constrained to you; for I am an insignificant, unimportant being, who can do nothing but love and honour him, and strive to make him happy. I would fain dance and sing like a child, and drive away all care from him. My one desire is to understand his great and noble nature, and in good fortune and in bad to stand faithful and true by his side.

Then followed a further appeal for the love and help of this friend of Lassalle's early years. It was all in vain. Instead of a letter, Helen received from the Countess what she called "a scrawl," and Lassalle a long homily on his lack of judgment and foresight. Lassalle defended himself, and so the not too pleasing correspondence went on.

Yet these days in Berne were the happiest in the lives of Lassalle and his betrothed. Helen was staying with a Madame Aarson, and was constantly visited by her lover. It was agreed between them that Lassalle should follow her to Geneva, and see her parents. But no sooner had he entered his room at the Pension Leovet, in the neighbourhood of the house of Herr von Donniges, than a servant handed him a letter from Helen. It told how on her arrival she had found the whole house excited by the betrothal of her sister Margaret to Count von Keyserling. Her mother's delight in the engagement had tempted her (contrary to Lassalle's express wish) to confidences, and she had told of her love for the arch-agitator. Her mother had turned upon her with loathing, execrated Lassalle without stint, spoken scornfully of the Countess, the casket robbery, and kindred matters. "It is quite impossible," urged the frantic woman, "that Count Keyserling will unite himself to a family with a connexion of this kind." The father joined in the upbraiding, the disowning of an undutiful daughter. One has but to remember the vulgar, tradesman instinct, which then, as now, guides the marriage ideals of a certain class, to take in the whole situation at a glance.

Lassalle had hardly begun to read the letter when Helen appeared before him, and begged him to take her away immediately--to France--anywhere! Her father's violence, her mother's abuse, had driven her to despair.

Lassalle was indignant with her. Why had she not obeyed him? He would speak to her father. All would yet be well. But--she was compromised there--at his hotel. Had she a friend in the neighbourhood?

At this moment her maid came in to say that there was a carriage ready to take them to the station. A train would start for Paris in a quarter of an hour. Helen renewed her entreaty, but Lassalle remained resolute. He would only receive her from her father. To what friend could he take her? Helen named Madame Caroline Rognon, who beheld them with astonishment.

A few minutes later Frau von Donniges and her daughter Margaret entered the house. Then followed a disagreeable scene between Lassalle and the mother, ending, after many scornful words thrown at the ever self-restrained lover, in Helen being carried off before his eyes--indeed, by his wish. Lassalle had shown dignity and self-restraint, but he had killed the girl's love--until it was too late.