ned 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