her. The fact that I could not give the bonds
which a lieutenant must have in order to marry, did not seem to me at
the time an insurmountable difficulty. My sweetheart thought just as I
did, that we only need wait until her second sister was old enough to
take her place in the household. As soon as this was possible, we could
live in the city. An old aunt, whose heir I expected to be, had, as she
said herself, long had her trunks packed for the journey to the other
world, and then I could easily raise the necessary sum; while the fact
that my marriage would be a _mesalliance_ especially delighted my heart
on account of my family, with whom I had long before broken off all
relations.

"But the departure of my aunt was put off from year to year; and we
resolved not to wait till our best days were past, and lived for some
four or five years in Christian and true marriage, though it had not
received ecclesiastical sanction. Our only trouble was the loss of
our four children. At last my aunt betook herself to her last
resting-place; and now, for we were again expecting a child, we made
preparations to procure an official recognition of our union, though
nothing could make it closer than it was already. But see what sublime
sentiments were all at once expressed by my good comrades!--the whole
corps knew our relations to one another in all its uprightness, and
knew me besides. The honor of the corps would suffer under it, they
said, if I married a 'person' who had had children before the official
recognition of her marriage. They wouldn't have found it in the least
offensive had I merely continued the old relations. The logic of this
_point d'honneur_ was incomprehensible to my stupid head, as well as to
my wife's. But while it merely made mine sit all the firmer on my
shoulders, so that I preferred to resign rather than to submit, it
threw my poor wife's completely off its balance. We went through the
ceremony sadly; the child, which was soon after brought into the world,
died within a few months; and since that time the poor creature has
been afflicted with the melancholy delusion that she has the ruin of my
life upon her conscience. I have tried a hundred times to make it clear
to her that I could have wished for nothing better than to be free from
the routine of military service, and devote my life to my studies.
There are certain points in military history, and also a few technical
problems and controversial questions,