en in
repose, was like the conventional pictures of Christ. His fascinations
destroyed the peace of many a woman; and it was only after many years of
self-indulgence that he married the faithful Mathilde Mirat in what
he termed a "conscience marriage." Soon after he went to his
"mattress-grave," as he called it, a hopeless paralytic.

To Heine came Marx and his beautiful bride. One may speculate as to
Jenny's estimate of her husband. Since his boyhood, she had not seen him
very much. At that time he was a merry, light-hearted youth, a jovial
comrade, and one of whom any girl would be proud. But since his long
stay in Berlin, and his absorption in the theories of men like Engels
and Bauer, he had become a very different sort of man, at least to her.

Groping, lost in brown studies, dreamy, at times morose, he was by no
means a sympathetic and congenial husband for a high-bred, spirited
girl, such as Jenny von Westphalen. His natural drift was toward a
beer-garden, a group of frowsy followers, the reek of vile tobacco, and
the smell of sour beer. One cannot but think that his beautiful wife
must have been repelled by this, though with her constant nature she
still loved him.

In Heinrich Heine she found a spirit that seemed akin to hers. Mr.
Spargo says--and in what he says one must read a great deal between the
lines:

The admiration of Jenny Marx for the poet was even more ardent than
that of her husband. He fascinated her because, as she said, he was "so
modern," while Heine was drawn to her because she was "so sympathetic."

It must be that Heine held the heart of this beautiful woman in his
hand. He knew so well the art of fascination; he knew just how to supply
the void which Marx had left. The two were indeed affinities in heart
and soul; yet for once the cynical poet stayed his hand, and said no
word that would have been disloyal to his friend. Jenny loved him with a
love that might have blazed into a lasting flame; but fortunately there
appeared a special providence to save her from herself. The French
government, at the request of the King of Prussia, banished Marx from
its dominions; and from that day until he had become an old man he was
a wanderer and an exile, with few friends and little money, sustained by
nothing but Jenny's fidelity and by his infinite faith in a cause that
crushed him to the earth.

There is a curious parallel between the life of Marx and that of Richard
Wagner down to the time wh