earnestness. Jestingly
he added: "Dear friend, if little Weill should visit us, you shall have
another evidence of my reverence for hoary Mosaism. Weill formerly was
precentor at the synagogue. He has a ringing tenor, and chants Judah's
desert songs according to the old traditions, ranging from the simple
monotone to the exuberance of Old Testament cadences. My wife, who has
not the slightest suspicion that I am a Jew, is not a little astonished
by this peculiar musical wail, this trilling and cadencing. When Weill
sang for the first time, Minka, the poodle, crawled into hiding under
the sofa, and Cocotte, the polly, made an attempt to throttle himself
between the bars of his cage. 'M. Weill, M. Weill!' Mathilde cried
terror-stricken, 'pray do not carry the joke too far.' But Weill
continued, and the dear girl turned to me, and asked imploringly:
'Henri, pray tell me what sort of songs these are.' 'They are our
German folk songs,' said I, and I have obstinately stuck to that
explanation."

Meissner reports an amusing conversation with Madame Mathilde about the
friends of the family, whom the former by their peculiarities recognized
as Jews. "What!" cried Mathilde, "Jews? They are Jews?" "Of course,
Alexander Weill is a Jew, he told me so himself;--why he was going to be
a rabbi." "But the rest, all the rest? For instance, there is Abeles,
the name sounds so thoroughly German." "Rather say it sounds Greek,"
answered Meissner. "Yet I venture to insist that our friend Abeles has
as little German as Greek blood in his veins." "Very well! But
Jeiteles--Kalisch--Bamberg--Are they, too.... O no, you are mistaken,
not one is a Jew," cried Mathilde. "You will never make me believe that.
Presently you will make out Cohn to be a Jew. But Cohn is related to
Heine, and Heine is a Protestant." So Meissner found out that Heine had
never told his wife anything about his descent. He gravely answered:
"You are right. With regard to Cohn I was of course mistaken. Cohn is
certainly not a Jew."

These are mere jests. In point of fact, his friends' reports on the
religious attitude of the Heine of that period are of the utmost
interest. He once said to Ludwig Kalisch, who had told him that the
world was all agog over his conversion:[105] "I do not make a secret of
my Jewish allegiance, to which I have not returned, because I never
abjured it. I was not baptized from aversion to Judaism, and my
professions of atheism were never serious. My