ine?" cried Heine enthusiastically.

"I am glad you love her," his visitor replied simply.

"You mean you are astonished. Love? What is love? I have never loved."

"You!" And all those stories those countrymen of his had spread
abroad, all his own love-poems were in that exclamation.

"No--never mortal woman. Only statues and the beautiful dead
dream-women, vanished with the _neiges d'antan_. What did it matter
whom I married? Perhaps you would have had me aspire higher than a
_grisette_? To a tradesman's daughter? Or a demoiselle in society?
'Explain my position?'--a poor exile's position--to some
double-chinned _bourgeois_ papa who can only see that my immortal
books are worth exactly two thousand marks _banco_; yes, that's the
most I can wring out of those scoundrels in wicked Hamburg. And to
think that if I had only done my writing in ledgers, the 'prentice
millionaire might have become the master millionaire, ungalled by
avuncular advice and chary cheques. Ah, dearest Lucy, you can never
understand what we others suffer--you into whose mouths the larks drop
roasted. Should I marry fashion and be stifled? Or money and be
patronized? And lose the exquisite pleasure of toiling to buy my wife
new dresses and knick-knacks? _Apres tout_, Mathilde is quite as
intelligent as any other daughter of Eve, whose first thought when she
came to reflective consciousness was a new dress. All great men are
mateless, 'tis only their own ribs they fall in love with. A more
cultured woman would only have misunderstood me more pretentiously.
Not that I didn't, in a weak moment, try to give her a little polish.
I sent her to a boarding-school to learn to read and write; my child
of nature among all the little school-girls--ha! ha! ha!--and I only
visited her on Sundays, and she could rattle off the Egyptian Kings
better than I, and once she told me with great excitement the story of
Lucretia, which she had heard for the first time. Dear Nonotte! You
should have seen her dancing at the school ball, as graceful and
maidenly as the smallest shrimp of them all. What _gaiete de coeur_!
What good humor! What mother-wit! And such a faithful chum. Ah, the
French women are wonderful. We have been married fifteen years, and
still, when I hear her laugh come through that door, my soul turns
from the gates of death and remembers the sun. Oh, how I love to see
her go off to Mass every morning with her toilette nicely adjusted and
her dainty praye