Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

MEMOIRS OF BERTHA VON SUTTNER

MEMOIRS OF BERTHA VON SUTTNER
THE RECORDS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE
AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION
VOLUME I

PUBLISHED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF PEACE

GINN AND COMPANY, BOSTON AND LONDON

1910

COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY GINN AND COMPANY

ENTERED AT STATIONERS’ HALL

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Athnæum Press

GINN AND COMPANY · PROPRIETORS BOSTON · U.S.A.

PREFACE
TO MY ENGLISH AND AMERICAN READERS

It is a great gratification to me that the story of my life—which I cannot suppose to be of general interest except in so far as it is linked with the story of a world-wide movement—is now put before the great community of the English-speaking nations; for it is in these very nations that the origin of that movement is to be sought, and by them its final victory is being most efficiently hastened. I have been brought to a clear recognition of this fact especially by the days I have spent in the United States and in England in recent years. There I perceived with astonishment and admiration how in these two countries (especially in America) the peace problem, still largely antagonized or ignored on the continent of Europe, has not only met with widespread comprehension but also received already a positive and practical working out. Little of this is told in the present book; yet in it I have set down the fact that the reading of English scholars and thinkers (Herbert Spencer, Henry Thomas Buckle, etc.) was what opened my mind to take in the peace cause, and furthermore that a tract of the London Peace Association presided over by Hodgson Pratt, accidentally coming to my knowledge, gave the initial occasion for all that I have endeavored to do as a helper in the peace movement.

In the year 1904 I came to America on the occasion of the Boston Congress. Of the sublime impressions that I there received I give a brief and fragmentary account in the supplementary chapter appended to this edition. In the year 1907 I attended the Interparliamentary Conference in London, and there had opportunity to hear Campbell-Bannerman speak; his proposals for the limitation of armaments, and for a League of Peace among states, bore renewed witness to the pacifist disposition of British statesmen. A year later, while the Peace Congress was being held in London, it was my privilege to meet the King and Queen of England; and in words that I heard from the mouth of Edward VII, and in those which he caused to be written to me by his private secretary, Lord Knollys, I have confirmation of the fact that the name by which he has passed into history, Edward the Peacemaker, is in full measure his due.

At the last moment, just as I am writing these lines, the question of the peace of the world has led to the taking of remarkable steps in America. The most prominent men in the Union—Taft, Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Knox, etc.—are coming forward with positive proposals for the organization of the world, and the House of Representatives has accepted a most significant law. Of this one of the greatest American workers for peace writes me as follows in a letter dated from Skibo Castle, June 30, 1910:

... The greatest news received lately is the passing of a bill by the House and Senate of the United States, establishing a commission to take measures to bring about a League of Peace among nations. Mr. Roosevelt is to be chairman. This means business. America is now in earnest. We hope she will no longer be dragd into enormous armaments. The good work goes bravely on.

Always yours

Andrew Carnegie

Yes, indeed: our brothers of the English-speaking race—especially those in the young New World—“mean business” when they undertake anything. And their enterprises are not (as an old prejudice assumes) limited to the commercial and financial domain, but embrace the region of the highest human thought, and rest upon the deepest ethical foundations.

BERTHA v. SUTTNER

Vienna, 1910

CONTENTS OF VOLUME I

PART ONE
1843–1861

I
CHILDHOOD
My certificate of baptism · The revolution of 1848 · Landgrave Fürstenberg · The Feather Ball · Castle Matzen

What gives me some justification for publishing my experiences is the fact that I have met many interesting and distinguished contemporaries, and that my participation in a movement which has gradually grown to be of historic consequence has given me many glimpses into the political affairs of our time; and that hence, all in all, I have something to say that is really worth publishing.

Of course, if I meant to tell only of this period of my life, I should have to confine myself to the history of the past fifteen or twenty years, and wholly forego conjuring up pictures from my youth; and I should have to deny myself the writing down of those personal recollections which my whole changeful life has stamped upon my memory. But I will not deny myself this. Now that I have been induced by the above-mentioned reason to write my memoirs, it shall be a genuine record of a life. Once again shall the stages of the long journey come in due order before my inward eye, and from them what seems to me suitable for reproduction shall be photographed on these pages.

So, without further exordium, let us begin:

The beginning of all human life is birth. Where and when and in what environment I came into the world is most authentically shown by my certificate of baptism. Here is the copy of that document:

Certificate of Baptism

ad W.E. 200

From the Register of Births and Baptisms of the Parish of St. Maria-Schnee, Lib. XIII, pg. 176, it is hereby officially certified that in the year one thousand eight hundred and forty-three (1843) on the ninth day of June was born in S.C. 697/2, and on the twentieth day of the same month was baptized in accordance with the use of the Catholic Christian Church by the then parish priest, the Reverend Father Thomas Bazán,

Bertha Sophia Felicita Countess Kinsky of Chinic and Tettau, legitimate (posthumous) daughter of the Right Honorable Franz Joseph Count Kinsky of Chinic and Tettau, retired Royal and Imperial Lieutenant Field-Marshal and Actual Chamberlain, born in Vienna—a legitimate son of his Excellency the Right Honorable Ferdinand Count Kinsky of Chinic and Tettau, Royal and Imperial Chamberlain and Grand Steward and seigneur of the domain of Chlumec, by his wife the Honorable Lady Christine, born Princess Liechtenstein—and his wife, the Honorable Lady Sophia Wilhelmine Countess Kinsky of Chinic and Tettau, born Von Körner, born in Prague (a legitimate daughter of the Honorable Herr Joseph von Körner, Captain of Cavalry in the Royal and Imperial Army, by his wife Frau Anna, born Hahn).

The sponsors at the christening were Barbara Kraticek, lady’s maid, and the Honorable Herr Arthur Count Kinsky of Chinic and Tettau. Midwife Frau Sabina Jerábek of S.C. 124.

Hereto witness the hand of the undersigned, and the parish seal.

Prague, Parish of St. Maria-Schnee, November 27, 1866

Dr. (illegible)

Minister at St. Maria-Schnee

At this christening service—though I vowed and abjured so many things in it—I was not present. For I do not understand by the word “I” the living corporeal form in which it is contained, but that self-consciousness which is absent both in infancy and also at frequent intervals throughout life: in sleep, in fainting, in narcotic stupefaction, under the influence of drugs, and in a great many moments when one merely breathes and does not think, look, hear; when one merely continues his existence vegetatively until the I resumes its functions.

Prague, then, was the city where they set up my cradle, over which, as over all cradles, so much was unprophesied. But my mother, who at my birth was already a widow, soon moved to Brünn, and what I remember of childhood is events that took place in the Moravian capital.

There I see myself standing by the window—five years old—and looking down into the “great square,” where a noisy throng is in wild commotion. A new word strikes upon my ear,—Revolution. Every one is looking out; every one is repeating the new word and is greatly excited. What my sensations were I no longer remember, but at any rate I too was excited, else the picture and the word would not have impressed themselves on my mind. But there is no more to it. The picture does not arouse any comprehension; the word has no meaning. Thus appears my first experience of a historical event.

But my memory reaches farther back, and shows me a scene which I was concerned in at the age of three, and which stirred me far more powerfully than the political overturnings of the year 1848.

I am about three years old. It is a beautiful afternoon, and my mother and my guardian are planning to take me with them to a picnic in the Schreibwald. The Schreibwald, a favorite place for excursions from Brünn, shines among my memories of childhood as the sum of all natural beauty, festive joy, woodland shade, mountain-climbing, social meals,—in a word, as the acme of that combination of delights known as a picnic. At that date, on the memorable afternoon, all these experiences were doubtless not yet part of my consciousness; perhaps it was the very first time I was to be taken to the Schreibwald; but to me the name was forever afterwards associated with the following event.

They dressed me in a white cashmere frock trimmed with narrow red braid. A superb thing—décolleté; I can still see before me the pattern of the braiding, I could draw it on paper. How the onlookers would marvel when they espied that! I felt myself beautiful in it, positively beautiful. And then my guardian, looking out of the window (I can see him too in his general’s uniform), remarked that it was clouding up, it would probably rain. There followed a short session of the cabinet,—the general, my mother, and the chambermaid Babette,—and the decision was announced: the beautiful new frock might suffer harm.

“Put an old frock on the countess,” was my mother’s command. But the countess declared most positively that she protested against it. I am in the new frock: j’y suis, j’y reste; with this plagiarism thirty years in advance of its original she made known her inflexible will. Perhaps, as a matter of fact, not so much with words as with shrieks and stamping of feet.

But consequently the next picture in this indelible picture gallery shows me the brilliantly clad, beautiful, and energetic creature laid on a large table, her face against the table-top, her red-embroidered frock lifted by the obliging hand of the tall army man who stood by; and from the maternal hand, slap, slap, the first whipping, with its burden of despair and dishonor, came down on the object.

Yes, despair: that there could be such great woe in the world, and the world not go to pieces under it, was most likely incomprehensible to me. At last the wild sobbing subsided; I was stood in a corner and had to beg for pardon—the victim of such grievous outrage, beg for pardon into the bargain! But I did; unhappy I was, deeply unhappy, but subdued. To-day I do not know why this occurrence made such a deep impression on my soul; was it injured vanity on account of the ravishing frock, or injured honor on account of the disciplinary procedure? Probably both.

Still another picture is fixed in my memory. Oh, I must have been a very vain and pleasure-loving little ninny! My mother comes into the nursery; she is wearing a beautiful gown, such as I have never yet seen on her, and jewelry on her bare neck: mamma is going to the ball, and they explain to me that this is a festivity where all are dressed so beautifully as that and dance in rooms that are all lighted up. I want to be taken with her, to go to the ball too. “Yes, my little roly-poly is going to the ball too.” (I scream with delight.) “To the Feather Ball she is going.” With that the beautiful mamma kisses me and goes. “So,” says Babette, “now we will get ready for the Feather Ball.” And she begins to undress me, which I permit in joyful anticipation. But when, instead of being dressed in my best, I am put to bed and learn that this is the Feather Ball, I break out in wild sobbing, deceived, trifled with, humiliated.

I must delay a moment over the portrait of my guardian. It cast a friendly radiance over all my childhood and early youth. Friedrich, Landgrave of Fürstenberg, had been the comrade and friend of my deceased father, and he faithfully fulfilled till his death the duties which he had undertaken as guardian and protector and watchful friend to the fatherless child. I simply worshiped him; I regarded him as a being of a higher race, to whom I owed and gladly rendered unconditional obedience, honor, and love. He was an elderly gentleman, past fifty, when I came into the world; and, such being the way of children in judging age, he seemed to me ever so old, but ever so dear. So smiling, so jolly, so lordly, so indescribably kind. That confectionery that he used to bring with him! those rich Christmas presents that he gave me! that care for my education, my health, my future!

Lordly—he was a lord in fact. A member of the proudest Austrian nobility, Master of the Ordnance, ultimately captain of the Arcièrengarde, one of the highest positions at the court. He was never absent at any of the great court functions, and brought me such lovely bonbons from every imperial dinner. His lofty station inspired me with pride rather than awe. For me he was “Fritzerl,” to whom I said du; on whose knee I used to climb, as long as I was little, and pull his mustache.

He died unmarried. His life was so methodically ordered, it ran its course so free from cares and passions, between service and sociality, that the wish to change it never arose in him. In Vienna he occupied handsome bachelor quarters in the Inner City; in Moravia he had a domain where he often spent a few weeks of the summer to see what his factors were doing; but he preferred, instead of living in his own lonely castle, to spend the summer months as a guest at the homes of his old mother and his various sisters. He never took journeys. At the Austrian boundarymonuments the world came to an end for him. Devotion, both churchly and military, had an essential place, I will not say among the virtues of his character, but among the virtues of his station in life. He was never absent at any Sunday mass, any feast of the church, or any parade. He had an enthusiasm for Field Marshal Radetzky, whom he had known well personally. The glory of the Austrian army was in his eyes one of the most admirable constituents of the universe. Society (by this name he distinguished the circle in which he was born and in which he moved) was to him the only class of human beings whose lives and fates interested him; and he always attended all the great functions given at the houses of the Schwarzenbergs, the Pallavacinis, etc. In the Adelskasino he had his regular rubbers of whist with sundry friends of his own rank. He was fond of card-playing in general—not gambling games, for he was in the highest degree steady, but innocent games such as piquet, omber, tarteln. This last he used to play with my mother at his twice-a-week morning visit to our house, and I was allowed to sit by to mark the points of the game with my little pencil. The various marriages in society interested him greatly; he had a troop of nephews and nieces who made more or less successful matches. He himself, though the male line was to become extinct with him, did not think of marrying. The reason was that he cherished an affection for a lady who, while she was the widow of an aristocrat, was not by birth capable of being presented at court, so a marriage with her appeared to be simply out of the question. He would not cause such a vexation to his family—and at bottom it would have been a vexation to him too; for everything that was out of the rut, outside of tradition, outside of “correctness,” went against his grain.

This figure stands before my memory as a type of the old-fashioned Austrian: a type of which there are doubtless some specimens still, but which, as is the fate of all types, is dying out. Our country is now made up of Slavs, Germans, Croats, Italians, (it would not do at all to say Magyars, they would grievously resent it,) and a few more nationalities, but the collective name “Austrian” cannot again become a proudly patriotic conception until—if ever—all the different races, with individual autonomy, form a federative state as do the Germans, French, and Italians in Switzerland. A friend of mine—a middle-class man, but one who is made very welcome at court—was lately telling me of an interview that he had with the Emperor not long ago. In the course of a political conversation the Emperor asked him to what party he belonged: “To the one which has only a single adherent, that is myself.” “And what party is that?” “The Austrian, your Majesty.” “Well, how about me? don’t you count me?” rejoined Franz Joseph, smiling.

—To come back to the past and my dear Fritzerl. It is a good thing that he did not live to see the events of 1866. The defeats in Bohemia, the severance of Venetia,—it would have cut him to the heart. And he would have found it simply incomprehensible, as it were a calamity violating all the laws of nature, and especially all divine ordinance. In that conception of the world which characterizes the type that I refer to, an essential point is the belief that Austria is the center of the world, and that any disaster which befalls it—especially any disaster in war—means an unnatural neglect of duty on the part of Providence. Unless such defeats be meant as punishment, as merited chastisement for the spread of unbelief, the dissolution of morals,[^[1]] the dissemination of revolutionary ideas. Then, surely, there is no help but by introducing strict discipline, reorganizing the army vigorously; then perhaps the Creator can be reconciled and the history of the world corrected by future reconquests. Fritzerl was spared these pains and these reflections.

If I said just now that there were still living some specimens of that type, I was probably mistaken. It is simply impossible that to-day the world is still mirrored in any head as it was mirrored in the heads of those who were born within the eighteenth century, who lived during the first introduction of the railway, who held the first photograph in their hands, who saw with some repugnance the displacement of oil lamps by petroleum. Essential to that old Austrian type (and it is the same with the old English and other old national types) is a certain limitation of experience and knowledge which to-day can no longer exist even in the most conservative circles.

That types alter from generation to generation, that outlooks, views, feelings change, is a fact of which one can best judge by one’s self when one looks back into the past. For every man, though in most cases he hugs the delusion of being a uniform continuous ego with definite qualities of character, is himself a chain of the most diverse types. Every new experience—leaving quite out of account the bodily changes of blooming and fading, of health and disease—modifies the mental essence. How much one sees, whether with the bodily eye as a landscape or with the mental as an outlook on the world, is not a matter of stronger or weaker eyesight, but peculiarly a matter of horizon.

If I look back into my childhood and youth, I do not see myself as the same person, as having altered, but see standing side by side the most diverse girl forms, each with a different horizon of ideas and filled with different hopes, interests, and sensations. And if I set beside them the forms from my maturer womanhood, or my present age, what have I (beyond the mere recollection, as faint as the recollection of pictures long since seen, or books long since read) in common with those phantoms, or they with me? Dissolving mists, flying shadows, a passing breath, is what life is.

My first love was no meaner a person than Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria. To be sure I had never seen him,—only his picture,—but I idolized him ardently. That he would marry me did not seem to me at all beyond the bounds of possibility; on the contrary, fate owed me something of the sort. Of course I should have to wait five or six years yet, for I recognized that a ten-year-old child could not be made empress. I should have to have bloomed out into a maiden of fifteen or sixteen, the most beautiful maiden in the land; the young sovereign would sometime espy me, enter into a conversation with me, be ravished with my qualities of mind, and immediately lay his august person at my feet. That was the time when I was convinced that the world had a fairy-tale fortune ready for me. I exerted myself sincerely to deserve it and to be ready to show brilliantly, when it came, that I had found my right place; learning, learning, practicing, practicing, amazing myself with my progress and knowledge. I was a real infant prodigy—in my own eyes. It is true that I spoke French and English well (from my earliest childhood I had had French and English bonnes), I played the piano remarkably well, I had read an enormous deal: the Abbé Fleury’s Histoire de France, Le Siège de la Rochelle; Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas and Marie Tudor; half of Schiller, Fladung’s Physics; “Jane Eyre,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”—those were the books (not children’s books, it will be seen) in which I reveled at that age. Besides, I loved to dip into the cyclopedia and pluck blossoms of all branches of knowledge. From love of learning? I will not assert it; I think those lovely blossoms seemed to me desirable only to make a wreath of for my adornment.

As an evil chance would have it, so soon as the year 1854—consequently I was only eleven years old—Emperor Franz Joseph espied his cousin Elisabeth, engaged in conversation with her, and laid his august person at her feet. I was not exactly unhappy (there are plenty more fairy princes), but thenceforth I took a lively interest in Elisabeth of Bavaria, sought for portraits of her, thought she bore some resemblance to me, and imitated her way of doing her hair. You see, my actual vehement passion for my young liege had died out some time since. Chiodo caccia chiodo; the Italians use this proverb to illustrate the fact that one love expels another.

On my eleventh birthday I had been taken to the theater for the first time. “The White Lady”[^[2]] was given. Ah, but that George Brown! (“What joy to be a soldier!”) Yes, that is the comeliest profession—next to that of opera tenor. For anything more captivating than that singer,—I still remember his very name, Theodor Formes, so the impression must have been deep,—anything more chivalrous I had never dreamed of. The prince destined for me must look like that. He would not even have to be a prince; only, if possible, in case he was not a tenor,—I would not have given Herr Formes the mitten,—at any rate a soldier. In telling this I see that I was a silly girl, to be sure, but not a genuine child. That is probably due to my not having had any playmate of my own age, but living only in the world of books, whose heroes were themselves not children but grown people, whose fortunes turned mostly upon love and marriage.

The most important thing in the universe, anyhow, was my little person. The course of the world was only the machinery whose wheels were all geared for the purpose of preparing a radiant good fortune for me. Was I alone such a foolish, conceited child, or is this center-of-the-world feeling a natural feeling in general among children and creatures of limited intelligence? Is modesty a noble fruit which ripens only on the tree of experience and knowledge?

It is just by this that the type of a man or of a class may be authentically gauged—by what appears important. Of notable importance to me in those days of childhood, besides the all-overtopping “I,” were the Christmas festival; the great spring house-cleaning; the Old Ladies’ Home at Brünn; chestnut-gathering in the paths of the Augarten, carpeted with autumn leaves; Fritzerl’s visits, my mother’s beautiful singing, this mother’s axiomatic great love for me, and my love for her, which was so great that when she went to Vienna for two or three days I would sob for hours as if my heart were broken.

With such a circle of importance I might frame all the various sections of my life, and thereby most clearly realize the phases, from that first memory of the important pattern of braid on the white cashmere frock down to the ideal of an assured international reign of law, which to-day appears to me a thing so important as to discount everything else.

Here it is a question of something that is yet to come into existence, and I think that attention to such things is but rare. Most people—and with them I in the earlier epochs of my life—take the surrounding world and the prevailing conditions as something given, axiomatic, almost unalterable, upon whose origin one thinks but little, and upon making any possible change in it not at all. As the air is here for breathing, and one is not called upon to make any change in it, so the given social order—political and moral—is here to furnish the atmosphere, the vital air, of our social existence. Of course one does not think that in these words, for the conception I speak of is altogether artless; that is, it exists rather in sensation than in consciousness, just as we also, without becoming conscious of it, draw breath constantly and do not think of the quantity of nitrogen and oxygen in the air.

The recollection of a visit to the country in the year 1854 has remained vividly fixed in my memory. To this day I see before me different pictures of the castle, garden, and forest of the domain of Matzen, while so many other scenes which I have since looked upon have vanished from my memory. A peculiar camera it is that one carries in his head, in which many pictures etch themselves so deeply and clearly, while others leave no trace. It must be that the apparatus just snaps open for a moment in the brain, but remains closed most of the time, so that the outer world does not get photographed.

Then was not the first time that I had been at Matzen, but of the earlier visit I have only a very dim idea. I only see myself carried into the drawing-room in the nurse’s arms to be caressed there by the lady of the house, Aunt Betty Kinsky, and her two grown daughters, Rosa and Tinka. In the year 1854, when my mother was invited to Matzen again, Aunt Betty no longer held sway there; she had died some years previously, and the daughters had married away,—Rosa to a Baron Hahn in Graz, Tinka to General Count Crenneville, commandant of the fortress of Mainz. Mainz, you know, was at that time an Austrian garrison. How things do shift on this changeable surface of our earth—where everything, indeed, is in a continual process of change; but more swiftly and unexpectedly than mountains and valleys, than the forests and cities of a country, do its political boundaries and dependencies change.

To come back to Matzen, which still stands on the same spot, but which I have not seen again since then,—it was at that time under the dominion of a newly married couple. On the same day when Emperor Franz Joseph celebrated his wedding with Elisabeth of Bavaria, Count Christian Kinsky, the present lord of Matzen and Angern, had brought home his bride, Countess Therese Wrbna. A handsome and happy young couple.

A merrier, wittier man than “Christl” Kinsky cannot be imagined. To this all Vienna society bears witness. Even at an advanced age, in the anything but merry position of provincial marshal, he was able to bring gayety and good humor even into the party-rent provincial assembly hall.

The castle, old and towered, stands on a wooded mountain; from the second story a door leads out to a bit of level ground on which a decorative garden is planted, and before the garden grill lies the forest. A pavilion stands in the garden, and on the table in it lay colored glasses, blue, yellow, red. They had me look out upon nature through these (this memory dates from an earlier visit at Matzen, when I was still quite small), and to see this blue forest, this yellow garden, this green sky, was a magical surprise to me—I screamed with happiness. Oh, there is nothing to beat having been just lately born, and feeling as new everything—everything—that the world offers; tasting everything for the first time. It would be fine to keep being born over again and keep beginning everything over again from the start, traversing again the magic realm of surprises that dazzles us with the first colored glass, with the first Christmas-tree candle, somewhat later with the first kiss, and always as an undreamed-of virgin country....

II
EARLY YOUTH
Elvira · Playing “puff” · My mother’s singing · Clairvoyant Aunt Lotti · Roulette and trente-et-quarante · Castles in the air · My first journey · Season in Wiesbaden · Return · Grillparzer and Ebner-Eschenbach at Elvira’s · Radetzky’s death · A schoolgirl romance

When I was nearly twelve years old I was for the first time vouchsafed the good fortune of getting a companion of almost my own age.

A sister of my mother, known to me as Aunt Lotti, came on a visit, accompanied by her only daughter, Elvira. We two girls were fired with friendship for each other. I say “fired,” for our mutual affection was an ardent one, and Elvira in particular showed a real adoration for me.

Aunt Lotti was the widow of a Saxon named Büschel, by occupation a gentleman of leisure and bookworm. Elvira had, so to speak, grown up in her father’s library. Büschel’s favorite department had been philosophy, and he conversed with his little one mainly about Hegel, Fichte, and Kant. For refreshment from such heavy diet he handed her Shakespeare. And for very special sugarplums, Uhland, Körner, Hölderlin. Of course the result of this education was a little bluestocking. Elvira had begun writing at the age of eight,—songs, ballads, and the like,—and when I made her acquaintance she had already composed several dramas in prose and a few tragedies in verse. That she was to become the greatest poetess of the century was a settled thing in her mind, in Aunt Lotti’s, and in mine. Perhaps she would have, if an early death had not snatched her away. She did win the recognition of great connoisseurs—I name only Grillparzer, who read her pieces with admiring amazement and prophesied a great future for her. In our family circle her genius was undisputed. And she had that quality which stands for half of genius, iron-faced industry. Every day she—the child—voluntarily spent three or four consecutive hours at the writing-desk and wrote, wrote, wrote. Often she had several pieces of work on the stocks,—a story, a drama, and various poems in between. I remember the titles of some of the large pieces: one was called “Karl the Sixth,” another “Delascar.” The name of this last hero (I think he was a Moor) particularly pleased me, and seemed to me to be of itself a guaranty of success. Whether these dramas were ever completed I do not remember. I know I made their acquaintance in the form of outlines—it was only individual scenes that were already finished, certain especially effective monologues. Elvira was an indefatigable user of the file. If on one day she had read to us a great speech of Delascar’s, she often let us hear on the next day an entirely new edition of the same speech.

To me her future renown was a tenet of faith. And she did not doubt the fairy-tale fortune that life must bring to me; for, though she conceded my intellectual inferiority (there was not a vestige of literary tendency in me, the lyre was no more my instrument than the French horn), she had unbounded admiration for my physical endowments and social talents—I must become a great lady and take all hearts by storm. As may be seen, we did not fail in mutual appreciation, and this was the soil in which our friendship flourished so luxuriantly.

Elvira did not hope any social successes for herself. She was conscious of her bashfulness and her lack of beauty. Small, with too large a head, a Schiller head, she was certainly not a pretty girl; besides, she was awkward in her movements, helpless in conversation,—no, as a woman she would assuredly never please, while she was convinced (a conviction which I shared) that I as such would achieve all sorts of triumphs. She contented herself with the part destined to her, to become the Sappho of the nineteenth century. A modest little pair of cousins, it must be confessed!

So we were friends and swore lifelong fidelity to each other; we were playmates too. But he who at this word imagines that we played together with dolls or hoops, as would have befitted our age, is mistaken. We played “puff.” That was a game invented by us, named so by ourselves, with which we used to amuse ourselves, for hours at a time.

It consisted in this: we acted a comedy. Elvira took the part of the hero, I of the heroine. The hero kept changing: now it was a French marquis, now a Spanish student, or a rich English lord, or a young navy officer, or a statesman who has come to rather mature years, often a king appearing incognito; but I always represented myself, the heroine was always Bertha Kinsky, mostly sixteen or seventeen years old, but in many combinations already getting elderly—say twenty-two or twenty-three. The comedy usually ended with a marriage; but there were occasions when the hero died—then, naturally, it was a tragedy.

Before the game began, the time and place of the action were specified, the hero’s name and description had to be settled, and a situation prescribed. For example: In the year 1860 Bertha would be staying at a castle near Moscow as the guest of the Russian ambassador’s wife. The lady’s brother, Prince Alexander Alexandrovitch Rassumof, a very gloomy and melancholy misanthrope, tall, elegant, dressed in black, with uncannily gleaming eyes, is among the inmates of the house, but rarely shows himself. He is understood to have been through a great misfortune (a dark story of a false woman, of an opponent shot in a duel—the particulars are not known) and to have withdrawn from the world. The scene represents the garden, on the bank of a pond where a few swans are gliding. I am sitting on a bench under a weeping willow with a book in my hand, and from a side alley comes, buried in deep thought,—Alexander Alexandrovitch. Now, after this was settled, the game could begin, and we said “Puff.” By this magic word we were transformed into the dramatis personæ—I into the seventeen-year-old Bertha, Elvira into the mysterious Russian. And the dialogue began. If we wanted to interrupt the game for a moment, we said “Puff,” and straightway we were again the two little cousins, telling each other something: a scenic remark, such as “This pencil means a pistol,” or perhaps something private that had no connection with the game. And only when “Puff” was pronounced again was the dialogue resumed. To indicate that the one or the other changed color we had special signs: a quick and slight inflation of the cheeks meant a faint blush; vigorous inflation, repeated a few times, meant “suffused with crimson”; a swift, lightning-like drawing down of the corners of the mouth was turning pale; a complete rolling over of the under lip was downright ghostly pallor. The course that the piece was to take was not sketched in advance, but was left to the spontaneous development of the conversations and feelings, for in it we really felt awaking interest in each other, budding affection, and usually, to end with, glowing love that led to union for life. Such a dialogized novel often lasted for days; for we could not go on playing without interruption, since we were called away by other occupations,—lessons, walks, meals, etc. The presence of our mothers did not always disturb us: we sat down in another corner of the room, out of hearing, said “Puff,” and the gloomy Alexander, or whatever was the name of the hero of the day, was there again. To be sure we liked the game better when we were alone, for then the dialogue could be accompanied with telling gestures, and emotion could be expressed by raising our voices. When such a comedy was played through, a new hero and a new situation must be devised. Not always did something suggest itself; if not, we sat or walked together in a state of sober paff, or chatted, till suddenly the one or the other cried Wasatem. (Abbreviation for Ich weiss ein Thema, “I know a topic.”) If the proposed topic seemed good and interesting, then the word was “Puff,” and the transformation was accomplished.

I remember that once, when we were playing in our corner of the room, Aunt Lotti, busy with embroidery at the other end, called out, “There, I don’t like your cough a bit, Elvira! So dry and so obstinate—we shall have to ask the doctor.” Now Elvira had at that time no cough whatever, but we had for several days been engaged in an extraordinarily touching game of puff, in which the lover was a consumptive doomed to death.

I have spoken of my mother’s beautiful singing. This singing played a great and influential part in my childhood and later life. My mother always regarded it as a tragical missing of her vocation that she had not become an opera singer. In her early youth a famous Italian maestro had tested her voice and given her the assurance that no such soprano had been heard since Grisi, Pasta, and Malibran, and to this was to be added her dazzling presence; in short, the loftiest triumphs, the richest harvests of gold, would have lain open to the beautiful girl if she had adopted the theatrical career. Such was the opinion of the maestro, who also undertook to give her singing lessons after the old Italian method, and had, among other things, brought it to pass that she gave Norma’s entrance recitative with full-toned and tragic power, again putting to shame all the Grisis, Pastas, and Malibrans. But neither my grandparents nor “Aunt Claudius,” who had taken charge of my mother and brought her up, would hear a word of the theater, which in those days was still regarded as a sink of iniquity; and mamma’s Norma recitative never rang out on the boards, but very often thereafter in my nursery (where our piano stood), and imprinted itself on my soul as the ne plus ultra of womanly heroism and of operatic art. Druid priestess and mistletoe bough, passion, sublimity,—thus stood in my imagination the gleaming picture of Norma, enveloped in sweetest magic of melody, in unearthly potency of voice.

To her old age my mother felt it as an affront, as a deprivation of all the treasures that nature by her wonderous gifts had destined for her, that she had not been allowed to take a course of training for the theater. Indeed, if I should prove to have inherited this voice, she might perhaps then be able to experience in her daughter the same triumphs that she had missed; but of course the theatrical career would be still more out of place for a Countess Kinsky than it would have been for Fräulein von Körner, and it would not have done even to tell of such an idea to Fritzerl. Nor did any wish for it awake in me myself. I saw my future plainly before me, it was marked out for me in our daily games of puff: to be grown up and introduced into the world, to have hearts and offers of marriage flying to me, to meet the one, the only one, to whom my heart too would fly, because he was the most aristocratic, the most beautiful, the wisest, richest, and noblest of all. What he would offer to me, and I richly pay back to him, would be perfect and lifelong happiness.

It was soon manifest, too, that I had not a phenomenal voice; and only in such a case could my mother have contemplated the project of an artistic career for me, so there was no more talk of that possibility.

Whether my mother really possessed such a splendid voice as that maestro had persuaded her, and talent with it, of course I could not judge, but I took it on trust as a part of my creed; her singing pleased me very much, but what does a child understand? When I now go back to that time in thought, doubts come up in my mind, for her repertory was very dilettantish. Besides that Norma recitative and the immediately following adagio, Casta diva, she sang only the very easiest songs, making such a selection as—in my present judgment—does not itself give reason for inferring an artistic taste. To be sure, at that time there were no songs by Wolff and Brahms, not to say Richard Strauss; but even in those days pieces like Du hast Diamanten und Perlen, “Spanish Serenade,” Blau Äugelein, Gute Nacht du mein herziges Kind, “Oh, tell me, will she come to pray upon my grave,” and the like, belonged in the category of street songs and sentimental trash. She was not a pianist, so she could not accompany herself. Three times a week she sang for an hour accompanied by my piano teacher. If he brought a new song she had him play the voice part with the accompaniment, and the learning was a prolonged and toilsome task for her. From all this I now conclude that she was by no means a musical genius; and it takes that, aside from the strength, volume, and tunefulness of the voice, to be a Pasta, Grisi, Malibran, or a Henriette Sontag. My mother told many stories of the fortunes and victories of these celebrated stars; then with the story there sounded the undertone that she had been deprived of enjoying the like successes, and the feeling fastened itself upon me that a great singer was a marvelous sort of being at whose feet all contemporaries knelt in adoration.

My dear mother’s was altogether a rather enthusiastic, high-keyed temperament. Often she gave expression to her feelings in poems; but she had no ambition or vanity connected with this branch of her talents. She did not think herself a gifted poet; but she never lost the conviction that she could have been in music a star of the first magnitude.

Soon we had still more leisure to carry on our games of puff, Elvira and I. Our two mothers took a trip to the baths in the summer of the year 1855, and we two stayed at home under the charge of a governess. Their destination was Wiesbaden. The two ladies liked it so well there that in the early summer of the next year they went there again, and this time,—oh indescribable ecstasy—they took us with them. The first considerable journey in my life! Up to that time I had only been taken a few times to Vienna for two or three days, and that had been to me each time a festal occasion; but now a real journey to foreign parts, a prospective stay of weeks or perhaps months in a famous resort—it was too heavenly!

Besides, utility was to be combined with pleasure there. For nothing less was intended than to carry off one or two millions from the gaming-table. Aunt Lotti regarded herself as a clairvoyant. She was always having to do with presentiments, dreams, magnetic sleep, and such things. During the epidemic of table-tipping she had also been an extraordinary medium. Under her fingers the tables danced and leaped, and then even cupboards that weighed hundreds of pounds, etc. I often saw it myself; and when I helped form the chain there was such a coruscating “fluid” coming into my finger-tips too, that everything that I touched—the tables, the piano teacher’s tall hat, and the piano itself—began to run around. I remember it clearly, and could therefore come out as a palmary witness for table-tipping if I were not distrustful of the testimony of a child’s perception. It may have been imagination. But Aunt Lotti would not let any doubts be raised as to the whole sphere of the occult in general. Nothing could offend her more than not to acknowledge her gift of second sight.

In other respects she was a very sensible woman, and, as the widow of a scholar who had made her a participant in his intellectual concerns, she was many-sided in her culture and free-thinking in her tendencies; so her vein of occultism could not be taken as childish superstition. There was something else too. She often suffered from convulsions, and readily fell into hypnotic sleep, which in those days was not yet called by that name but by that of magnetic sleep, and the visions of which were rated as clairvoyance. The result was that she regarded these phenomena, which lay beyond the range of her normal waking life, as an especially mysterious power of her own, a power of vision reaching into the future.

During her stay at Wiesbaden the preceding year she had learned that when she went into the roulette room a number came into her mind, and then this number won. She did not play, she only noticed this in silence. My mother preferred to look on at the playing in the trente-et-quarante room, and she thought she perceived in herself too the gift of foreseeing when black won. She too did not play; but when they were back from the journey neither of the two sisters could get rid of the idea that it would really be an easy thing for them to get a colossal fortune out of the German banks.

But such a thing was not to be lightly undertaken; it was essential to test the phenomenon. So Aunt Lotti got a little bag with thirty-six numbers and a zero, my mother six packs of cards, and now a systematic test was carried out. Aunt Lotti threw herself into a sort of trance by fixed staring and concentrated thinking, till a number flashed through her brain; then Elvira put her hand in the bag and drew out a number. To be sure, it was not invariably the foreseen one, but very often an adjoining or similar one. For instance, the seer’s number was 5 and the drawn one was 6 (adjoining) or 25 (similar); so the method was determined to be that the transversals of the number thought of should be bet on. Only those who know roulette will understand me; I consider it superfluous to make myself clearer to others, as I have not the least intention of starting a propaganda for Aunt Lotti’s system of play. Regular accounts were kept of the losses and winnings, and the result was uniformly a large amount of net winnings. Was there self-deception about it? I do not know; but the imaginary ledger always showed immense accumulations of profit. For the start was made with small stakes, and as the capital grew the stake was increased till it reached the maximum, and in this way there was no limit to the gains. Poor gambling-houses! Would we content ourselves with relieving them of one or two millions, or would we ruin them entirely? That was left for further consideration. The latter would certainly be a moral deed, for gaming is an evil passion by which so many are seduced and ruined or at least injured, for it is a vice which—Aunt Lotti despised gaming; it was hateful to her; but when one was furnished with such a miraculous gift would it not have been a downright sin not to lift the treasures to which one needed only to put out a hand?

Aunt Lotti took no stock in my mother’s similar plans, for she was no clairvoyant, no natural wonder, only a sort of imitator. It would soon be seen that nothing was to be realized. But my mother’s tests came out just as brilliantly. I myself dealt the cards and entered the winnings and losses in a little book. The winnings were always so much the greater that the first million was reached in a few weeks. “Chance,” opined Aunt Lotti. Self-deception? I now ask myself in this case also. The figures were there, and now plan-making and air-castle building broke out among us in great style. In the neighborhood of Brünn there is a Liechtenstein domain, Eisgrub, with a marvelous castle and park; we had seen it once when we were on a picnic. We would buy Eisgrub. Perhaps Prince Liechtenstein would not part with it—well, one can have anything if one only pays a price well above the market value. The castle was most beautifully furnished, but yet a good many things would have to be changed; for instance, I was to have a chamber with porcelain walls and porcelain furniture. This porcelain room afforded me such anticipatory joys of possession as few things ever did. The pink diamonds in my future jewel case were a delight to me too. All people have white diamonds—the pink stones would be something special. But our wishes did not turn merely toward ornament and show; we meant also to practice beneficence on a large scale, i. e. build asylums for the blind, hospitals, etc.; and surprise with adequate properties all our kinsfolk and acquaintances who were suffering from any sort of lack. This whole array of dreams of the future, which had consolidated into an assured expectation, represented “the important thing” to me at that time.

Elvira kept aloof from all this plan-making. She set no store by earthly possessions; the only harvest she wanted to reap was poetic fame; her fancy was too thoroughly busied with its own creations to occupy itself with idle air-castle-building into the bargain. Our games of puff had undergone some modifications now: at present the hero no longer needed to be furnished with wealth, but other combinations were devised. A poor but proud lieutenant rejecting the adored millionairess who absolutely throws herself at his head, but moved to relent by the sight of her despair threatening to pass into consumption.

Thus the summer of 1856 came on, and the journey to Wiesbaden was undertaken. Each of the million-huntresses carried in her cartridge box (i. e. portemonnaie) a capital of a few hundred florins set apart for this use; and the game bags too, i. e. two big portfolios with combination locks, were in readiness for the noble quarry.

My guardian Fürstenberg was not taken into confidence: he was the personification of propriety and sober sense; anything queer was hateful to him. He did not approve of the journey itself to begin with. If he had known what crazy ideas (for he would certainly have thought them crazy) were connected with it, he would perhaps have put in a veto. He did try to talk them out of the trip to the foreign watering-place; he was particularly not suited with the fact that I was to be taken along. I ought not to be interrupted in my studies; besides, it struck him that my education in the most important things was very backward. Thus, e. g., I was not at all skillful with the needle. To be sure I regaled him every Christmas, and on the day of his patron saint, with embroidered pillows and slippers that teemed with roses and lilies, if it was not cat-heads or lion-heads for variety; but I was not capable of knitting an honest stocking, he knew, and he disapproved. I did not seem to him pious enough either: I knew the catechism by heart, no doubt, and had taken my first communion, but yet it did not seem to him that I had the right zeal for the faith, took the right pleasure in going to church.

As a counterpart to my guardian, Landgrave Fürstenberg, my cousin had her godfather General Count Huyn. He too had been on terms of close friendship with her father, and continued always anxious about his godchild’s welfare. He was more than conventionally pious, he was exaggeratedly pious. He had carried on long discussions with Elvira’s father; the Protestant scholar’s philosophy accorded but ill with the Catholic aristocrat’s religiousness verging on bigotry, but this divergence had been no detriment to their friendship—it was in the sphere of the most profound speculation that they conducted their theologico-philosophical debates, for Count Huyn’s piety was not that of simplicity but of Scriptural learning, so both of them found intellectual stimulus in these disquisitions.

Elvira had to write to her godfather every week, and usually received answers—friendly admonitions, little sermons. He knew of her poetic activity, but did not approve of it. Literature seemed to him most unbecoming to women. Virtuous and pious, modest and gentle, industrious, submissive, unassuming,—these were to be the qualities that it was for his little goddaughter Karoline (he never called her Elvira) to acquire. My cousin respected her godfather highly, but did not lay his sermons to heart. She, who had already read—I will not say understood—Hegel and Fichte and Kant, was not to be reached by the precepts of the primer. As a philosopher’s daughter and pupil she had come to take a view of the world which went beyond the line of creeds and represented deism on a basis of natural science.

I too, despite my youth, had fed my mind on Kant and Descartes, had studied Plato’s Phaedo and Humboldt’s Kosmos, and along with these the history of the wars of the Inquisition and of religion; and to the question “What religion do you profess?” I should have replied with Schiller, at that time my favorite poet, “None—I am too religious to.”

The first long journey—that brings on an indescribably sweet fever. Traveling was not indeed so comfortable at that time as to-day (though the comfort of to-day does still leave a great deal to be desired); there were then neither dining-cars nor toilet-rooms nor sleeping-cars; there was much of martyrdom connected with the ride; yet this journey seemed to me the sum of all enjoyment—nay, more, of all happiness.

When we arrived, our mothers were totally used up; we two schoolgirls felt nothing but sheer bliss. First a day of rest in the hotel, then house-hunting; then moving to a villa on the street that runs along the Kurort to the Dietenmühle; from our balcony one could hear the tones of the music at the Kur. Visit to the Kursaal. Entrance by a vestibule; then through a great ballroom with marble pillars, then to the right into the suite of gaming-rooms. Children were not admitted there; but we two, Elvira with her fourteen years, I with my thirteen and tall of my age, were regarded as young girls, and the liveried porters made no objections. All four of us wandered through the two roulette parlors, the two trente-et-quarante parlors, and the adjoining reception-rooms. All this was not at that time so gorgeously furnished as are now the gaming-rooms of the Casino at Monte Carlo, but was more like the interior of a castle. After we had seen the halls we went back through the ballroom and out on the other side of the building, to the terrace and the park. In the middle of the park lies a large pond, out of which rises a fountain, and on which dazzlingly white swans float. The music—an Austrian military band from Mainz—is playing on the terrace; and below the terrace stand chairs and tables, and there one sees a numerous and elegant assemblage sitting, standing, walking up and down. Many uniforms among them. The Prussian and Austrian garrisons from the fort, and also the Nassau army, are numerously represented there. Our mothers had a few last year’s acquaintances here; among others, a Nassau court dignitary with his wife; and by chance these were present on that first day, so social life was immediately started. That did not at all suit our mothers though: they had come for a far too serious piece of work to give themselves up to sociality. But in the forenoons they would be free, for the patrons of the place did not assemble till the time of the afternoon music; and perhaps it was even better to take the mind off now and then from the harassing exertion of the efforts to foresee.

A very tall youth in cadet uniform came up to our group. He was a nephew of the Court Marshal of Nassau, and begged to be introduced; Baron Friedrich von Hadeln. The young man saluted respectfully first the older ladies, then, with equal respect, us two. We thanked him graciously: we really were, then, already veritable young ladies.

Friedrich von Hadeln—he may have been eighteen years old—had strikingly noble features, a sort of Roman head. He talked very vivaciously, addressing especially us two. Elvira could not overcome her bashfulness, and remained reticent. I reaped the benefit of the conversational practice in our games of puff, and engaged in a lively dialogue.

The main action of the plot began at once on the next day. Aunt Lotti betook herself to the roulette table and won. While she was in the gaming-room we two girls stayed out on the terrace under my mother’s protection. And when my mother then went about her serious task—likewise winning on the first days—Aunt Lotti took up the business of watching over us. My youth fell in a time when a girl of good family must not stay a quarter of an hour unwatched. Ten steps across the street alone—that must not happen; by that one would have been, if not lost, yet irremediably compromised. The chaperon system, from which the young womanhood of to-day has made its escape by the bicycle, by the tennis-racket, and by the total change of standpoint in general, was then in its fullest vogue.

The thriving business of the millions (each had already doubled her working capital) was carried on only in the forenoon; the afternoon was filled out at the Kur music, or in walks to the Dietenmühle or the Greek chapel, and very frequently young Hadeln joined us. In the villa next door to us there lived an English family, Sir and Lady Tancred, with a seventeen-year-old daughter named Lucy. My cousin became violently infatuated with Lucy, but the little Englishwoman preferred me. I remember a call that the Tancred family made upon us, when the mother (who, be it said, was expecting very soon to be again a mother) sat down to the piano and sang an English ballad. The lady, who may have been thirty-four to thirty-five, seemed to us inordinately old, and the recollection of her performance remained in our memory for years as a fearfully comical episode. To be sure, she also sang without any voice, and with that English exaggeration of accented syllables which in itself is so unmusical. To choke down our laughter cost us an unspeakable effort at the time, and for years it continued to be a favorite comic performance in our circle when I sat down to the piano and sang as Lady Tancred “Oh—remembrance will come and remembrance will go—oh!”

Every Wednesday there was a ball in the great ballroom of the Kurhaus, but it was a very mixed company that attended. Every Saturday, on the other hand, there was held in the small halls a “réunion dansante” to which one had to procure cards of invitation, and in which there came together only the élite of the outsiders and the leaders of local society. Lady Tancred meant to take her daughter to one of these. Our mothers were urged to come too, and to bring us. “Ridiculous!” said they; “such children at a grown people’s ball! It’s out of the question.” But the Tancreds kept soliciting them, and we plied them with the most urgent entreaties, till the scruples gave way. Why, were we being treated as children here at all? Were we not taken to the Kursaal, to the music in the park? did not all the people, especially the young gentlemen, behave toward us as if we were grown up? Oh well, then, so be it; these little réunions are not formal balls anyhow, and if it gives the children such very great pleasure....

Meanwhile the great undertaking had fallen off somewhat. The winnings were gone again. Some blunder had been made, against which they would be on their guard in the future—you see it is different here from what it is at home—one gets carried away and plays without regard to the system; such a thing must not happen again. The thing to do now was, first rest a few days, and then begin at the beginning again and adhere strictly to the rules.

The preparations for the réunion were made. We were to wear misty white dresses, and for ornaments—the idea originated with us children—a wreath of cornflowers in our hair, a garland of cornflowers outlining the top of the corsage, and the overskirt caught up with little bunches of cornflowers. In the villa next door lived a florist; the order was given to him. I can still remember how I felt in the greenhouse where the florist took our order: how damp and warm it smelt there, how the red and white and yellow blossoms flamed round about—but loveliest among all the gay flower-mosaic the blue of a mass of cornflowers. Would we not look like elves of the field, so fresh and unassuming and poetic?—And that in the brightly lighted ballroom! We should make a sensation, and we were blissful—blissful as ever silly girls can be before their first ball, which they really have not yet any proper right to attend. But were we not exceptional creatures altogether, born to exceptional fates? If the million-factory did go wrong, what of it? The cornflowers would be a more original adornment than diamonds, and happiness did not lie in the external world and its treasures; it lay in us, in our buoyant sense of youth, in our—let me say it—immeasurable conceit. The one the greatest female dramatist of the future; the other, if nothing else, at any rate a beauty thronged with adorers—Oh, the silly, silly girls!

The great day came on. The florist punctually delivered his garlands: they were fastened to our clothes and into our hair; it really did look pretty, even if not so celestial as in our eyes. There was still daylight—for the month was June and the hour for the assembly was eight—when we, each with her mamma, got into two carriages (in one our toilets would have been crumpled up too much) and arrived at the Kursaal with beating hearts. On entering the brilliantly lighted parlors we saw our image in the ceiling-high mirrors, and observed the fact that the cornflowers appeared no longer blue but lilac. However, this did not impair the originality of the floral ornaments.

We met many acquaintances, and new ones had themselves introduced. Friedrich von Hadeln asked me for the first quadrille. I thought I noticed that a shade of annoyance flew over Elvira’s face. My vis-à-vis in this first quadrille of my life was Hadeln’s older sister Franziska. When her brother told me Franziska was twenty-three years old, I was amazed that so elderly a young lady still cared to dance, and I felt pity for her.

Among the Nassau officers who had themselves introduced to my mother and me there was a Prince Philipp Wittgenstein, who, as far as I can remember, paid noticeable attentions to me. Was a living game of puff to begin on this very first evening? Nay, for the young lieutenant did not especially please me, and I did have sense enough to see that I was still rather too young to marry. But it is a fact that a week later, on occasion of the second réunion, Prince Philipp Wittgenstein formally asked my mother for my hand.

My mother laughed: “The child is thirteen years old—under these circumstances you will not take offense at my declining your offer.” Thereupon the suitor withdrew. The affair was to me a pleasant little triumph, but I did not take it to heart.

Our stay in Wiesbaden was prolonged into the autumn, and ended with recognition of the fact that it is not so easy to break the bank—easier to break one’s self. After alternations of good and bad luck the capital that we brought with us was expended, a supplementary remittance was likewise lost, and the castle of Eisgrub at Brünn and the pink diamonds went up in smoke.

The two ladies did not on that account doubt their miraculous endowments; they only conceded that the excitement of real gambling paralyzes this gift—that one may be clairvoyant enough at home, but at the green table, where real gold is paid out or is drawn in by the pitiless rake, this magnetic force ceases to work. It was painful to renounce the beautiful dream, but against the fact of the fiasco nothing could be said, so the affair was given up; we went back to our home somewhat poorer in money, richer in experience. The two mothers were very much cast down, but the daughters were enraptured with the journey and with their taste of the pastimes of watering-place life. These memories would be something to live on for a long time.

Now we moved from Brünn to Vienna. Social life was over. We were relegated to the schoolroom again, as befitted our age. I devoted myself with redoubled industry to my studies in languages and the piano, and made excerpts from Brockhaus’s Konversationslexikon. The games of puff grew somewhat rare, for Elvira lived in a distant quarter of the city with her mother, and we came together only once or twice a week. She continued writing poetry. “Delascar,” which had been interrupted by the journey to Wiesbaden, was now polished and finished. Then came a comedy, Der Briefträger (“The Letter-Carrier”), and a sequence of ballads whose collective title I do not now remember.

The young poetess wanted to get the verdict of experts, and sent her manuscripts to Joseph von Weilen, whose dramas were at that time having much success in the Burgtheater, and to Feldmann, the writer of comedies. And she ventured higher yet: she addressed herself to Grillparzer, who was at the height of his renown, and to Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, whose star was then beginning to rise.

These two came to call on Elvira, and it was at our apartments. I can still see in my mind the old and somewhat morose Grillparzer as he came into our room, fatigued with stair-climbing. He had a lively conversation with Elvira, and urged her to keep on writing diligently—she might come to produce notable work. And young Marie Ebner—she was twenty-eight at the time—came likewise to return Elvira’s visit and give her verdict. This too, I believe, was favorable. Unhappily I cannot recall the details of these interesting visits. I have retained merely the impression that on that occasion Frau Ebner was especially pleased with me, though I was only a secondary person there. Later too, when she corresponded with Elvira or met her, she always inquired with interest for the beautiful (she said “beautiful,” I cannot help it, and after nearly half a century it is permissible to claim the long-lost epithet) Countess Kinsky.

Shall I here interpolate a personal description and tell how I looked at fifteen? Why not? Well, then,—an incredible abundance of hair, dazzling white little teeth,—Enough, I would rather stop. This self-flattery, even if it does date back to gray antiquity, has too silly a sound for me.

One day—it was in the beginning of the year 1858—my guardian came in looking quite pale.

“Do you know the news?”

“What has happened?” cried my mother. “Why, you are all upset!”

“Radetzky is dead!”

I remember that the news made on me the impression that one of the world’s darkest catastrophes had come upon it—the great Field Marshal no more! I knew what adoration Fritzerl felt for him and how painfully this loss must affect him. To be sure, Radetzky was already ninety-two; but for that very reason it seemed as if he were not to die at all, or at least as if he were predestined to come to be a hundred. At any rate the world, particularly Austria, was the poorer by a treasure. Such a hero! Such a demigod! My admiration for soldierly fame was devotional. There was nothing more piously loyal to the military than I. If any one had at that time had the idea of writing a book with such a nefarious title as Die Waffen nieder I should have deeply despised the author. Elvira was just the same. Radetzky’s death put her muse in a painful commotion at once. That same day a long poem was produced: a poetic wreath of all plants and flowers to lay on the grave of the victor of Custozza—roses, immortelles, pansies, but chiefly laurel, a stanza for each species.

With pride and emotion she gave us the hearing of this poem. She wept; I wept; Aunt Lotti decided, “To-morrow you must send that to your godfather Huyn and ask his judgment.”

Next day the manuscript went off to Galicia, where General Huyn was in garrison at the time. The answer arrived after a while,—in verse too. The yellowed sheet is in my possession, and I will copy it here; not that it has intrinsic literary value, but it offers an illustration of the pious spirit that so strikingly characterized the writer.

Stanislau, February 18, 1858

To Karoline

A host of lines thou sendest me,

For critic aid applying!

In prose I’ve shown proficiency,

But not in versifying.

Yet to myself I did confess,

If I am fit to greet her,

I must my little poetess

Address likewise in meter.

Once more, as in the days gone by,

Because the task compels me,

On Pegasus I’ll boldly fly,

And give thee what sense tells me.

The blossoms full of Love’s bright glow

Express their feelings fairly;

And yet their pretty praises go

With that old man’s life barely.

One thing, besides, has been left out

(An error hard to pardon)

That grows most freely all about,

Ev’n in our hero’s garden.

The thorns it is, that interlace

With all through which we wander,

At every time, in every place—

My Karolin’, O ponder!

The Lord has set them in our life

In every shape of sorrow,

That we might from this painful strife

Look gladly to a morrow.

The thorn flower thus upraised its voice:

“Thou fortunate old hero,

In thee let all the world rejoice,

At last I give thee zero!

“This warrior, as he reached his goal,

Finds me with ready warning

To men who fame and glory’s scroll

Crave too much for adorning.

“To all I fain a song would raise,

As from this tomb they sever,

That outward pomp and human praise

Can make men happy never.”

· · · · ·

The world of men goes blindly on,

Deceived by seeming merely;

The higher Judge ascends the throne;

He, He alone sees clearly.

Before the mighty judgment seat,

To hear the final sentence,

Proud kings and poorest serfs will meet,

Relying on repentance.

The dead will heed no song of praise,

No vain encomium paid them.

What will avail thy tuneful lays?

Thy prayers alone will aid them!

My child, up to this lofty height

A God man’s soul hath lifted:

“That we on earth may still unite

With those who’ve from us drifted.”

They who i’ the Faith have found release,

And passed away before ye,

Cry, “Seek within your heart for peace,

Not in this world’s false glory.”

Believe me, ’tis a solemn fact,

When Christians find interment

There’s nothing that will more detract

Than Eulogy’s preferment.

So in thy song of praise make known

How, ’spite of banners flying,

Within the tomb, unrobed, alone,

A hapless wretch is lying;

And he, a sinful mortal, now

His honors seeming hateful,

Will, trembling in God’s presence, bow,

And for thy prayers be grateful.

Then to thy beauteous wreath of fame,

Of laurel and everlasting,

Which to the splendor of his name

On the marshal’s tomb thou ’rt casting,

Choose one more blossom, meek and still,

To soothe earth’s grief its dower,

Which may our hearts with comfort fill—

That is the passion flower,

The symbol of the Cross. When dyes

Of dawn the world astonish,

And the laurel cries, “Here a hero lies!”

This shall to prayer admonish.

J. K. H.

Thus wrote the general about the Field Marshal. Aspergillum and saber!

Elvira was not edified; she had hoped for more appreciation of her martial hymn.

The summer of the same year we spent at the castle of Teikowitz, the Moravian estate of Landgrave Fürstenberg. He himself was not there, he had only put the castle hospitably at our disposal. Aunt Lotti and Elvira were invited too. There were no other guests, and calls were not exchanged with neighbors; so we four women spent this summer in real rural isolation and quiet. The beautiful park full of flowers, and the near forest, offered us blithe enjoyment of nature. Elvira wrote poetry more assiduously than ever, I kept up a great deal of reading and piano-playing. We two drew closer and closer in friendship—exchanged oaths to be constant in our friendship till our life’s end. Our mothers found it a little tedious, it would seem, for as a pastime they took up their experiments again to see if the faculty of presentiment still worked. Once more numbers were drawn and trente-et-quarante cards dealt, “but only for fun,” they said. For it was proved that the atmosphere of the gaming-room suspended the capacity for guessing, even when it had stood the tests ever so well at home; so we would not allow the great plans and projects to take another start. But it really would be interesting to ascertain whether that capacity had been altogether annihilated by the time spent at the real bank, or whether in the quiet of merely fictitious play it would reappear.

And lo, it did reappear. Not quite so brilliantly as before, but yet sufficiently to achieve great imaginary winnings. Should we perhaps risk it once more after all? Perhaps a second time they would be hardened against the “agitation” there? But no, that would be temerity. Besides, gaming is a detestable thing, it really afforded no pleasure at all—so no thoughts of going to the German watering-places again! But here in Teikowitz it was just as innocent as it was interesting to test that occult power.... Elvira, who officiated as drawer of the numbers, often urged that we should take another trip to Wiesbaden by all means; if not this year, next year anyhow. That was all the dream of her life, to see Wiesbaden again—it had been so divinely beautiful there.

Before me lies an old album which belonged to my cousin, and which I received after her death. On the first leaves there are entries in which is mirrored a chapter of romance that was enacted between us girls.

On the first page a small painted portrait shows my mother, the giver of the album: “Your loving Aunt Sophie, May 2, 1857.” Then come a few dried flowers and album-verses from various friends and acquaintances, witty inscriptions after the style of “S. N. D. our friendship never,”—

And now begins the romance:

For dear heaven’s sake!

Bertha Kinsky

Past!

8th July:

Remember that day. The 3rd friendship was sworn, the 8th you have proved it.

And on the next leaf,

Thank you!!

[Dried spray of birch]

Not past any more! These leaves are the witnesses of its ceasing to be past.

Taikowitz, the 19th July 1858.[^[3]]

Here follows the elucidation of these enigmatical inscriptions:

One day I went into Elvira’s room, and, as was very often the case, found her sitting at her writing-desk. I came up to her and saw her hastily cover up the blank-book in which she had been writing.

“What did you hide the book for?”

“I?” and she was suffused with fiery red.

“Show it to me.”

“No, no—”

“Have you secrets from me? Do you call that friendship?”

“You would laugh at me, mock at me!”

“Mock at you, I? You think thus of my friendship?”

“The book has love-songs in it.”

“Well, every poet writes those; there’s nothing to laugh at in that. On the contrary, I always feel that you write too many ballads, nothing that sounds personal. Read me one of those love-songs, do.”

She drew out the book:

“All right, you shall hear the first—there are ten of them in all.”

She read. They were glowing stanzas. I do not mean such as many of our up-to-date young girls print, volcanic outbursts of eroticism; but, within the range of the permissible, the respectably permissible, they were enthusiastic outpourings of heartfelt devotion. I thought them marvelous.

“You must send that to Grillparzer.”

“No, there must never a stranger see these poems—my love is my secret.”

“Your love? Why, surely that is only poetry; we don’t see anybody but the old schoolmaster and the minister; your verses are addressed to an ideal—”

“My ideal is alive; look here!”

She pushed the book over to me and pointed to the final poem. The next to the last line ended with the word adeln (unhappily I have forgotten the rest of the line), and the last ran

Weil ich dich liebe, Friedrich zu Hadeln.

(Because I love thee, Friedrich of Hadeln.)

“For dear heaven’s sake!” I exclaimed. It had given me a turn. There before me was the miracle. A real living love for a real living object. Elvira seemed to me transformed, and now the remembered figure of the Nassau ensign too came before my soul bathed in magical light. Yes, he was in truth handsome, and assuredly there was in his nature the power to adeln, “ennoble,” those who had learned to understand and to love him, the adorable Friedrich von Hadeln.

To make a long story short, in a few days I too was “in love.” I let Elvira pour out to me her enthusiasm and her accounts of what had so greatly pleased her about him, and what she had felt all this time with this hidden passion in her heart; I called back to my memory the features of him who was so glowingly admired; and soon I could not understand how it was that I had not also fallen in love on the spot—now, now, the fire began to burn in my heart too. I remember exactly how at a certain time it came over me clearly, the consciousness that I was equally in love with the irresistible Friedrich. In the night I had dreamed vividly of Wiesbaden. Again I danced the quadrille with the ensign, his elder sister vis-à-vis,—I felt the pressure of his hand in the chaîne anglaise and heard the tone of his voice. In the morning, on waking, I had the feeling that something new, rich, warm, gladsome, was inundating my soul. What could this be? For a few seconds I had no answer to this question, but then, with the recollection of the dream, I knew what it was: love.

I relate this because this sensation remained so distinctly stamped on my memory that I have derived from it a piece of knowledge which perhaps not every one has discovered, or not every one preserved in memory,—to wit, that in youth being in love comes upon one like something elemental, like a newly existing sort of material so to speak, and is then carried around with one as a possession, as a treasure. If it be even a hapless love, by this very misfortune one feels himself enriched, elevated, transformed. It may be a suffering, but it is a suffering which is unspeakably sweeter than all hitherto-known joys. That my love was a hapless, nay, a tragic love, was a thing of which I was conscious not without pride. The humorous side of the whole thing did not become clear to me till long afterward. At the time I saw only the frightful situation—I loved the same man for whom the friend of my bosom was burning, therefore I loved hopelessly.

Was I to confide in her, or lock my terrible secret in the depths of my soul? I decided for the former. I had reproached her too bitterly for having so long kept silence toward me—and we had then exchanged the promise that henceforth we would impart to each other everything, everything. I owed her a confession, therefore, and I made it in the way of inscribing on the page of her album the lamentable word “Past!” in English.

But now Elvira showed herself in her whole greatness. She said, “My friendship shall not only be sworn, it shall be proved too.—I step back, I renounce—be Friedrich von Hadeln yours.” And I could set down in the album, “On the 8th of July you have proved your friendship.” For a while I hesitated to accept the self-sacrificing present, but in a short time I seem to have given in, since so soon as July 13th I could set down that it was no longer past. “You are beautiful, you are brilliant,—by the gift of your hand he will become a thousand times happier than by insignificant me—therefore I renounce, not only for your sake but for his.” These reasons she adduced, and such as these; and I took possession of the sweetheart so nobly resigned to me, took possession so thoroughly that henceforth our games of puff assumed a new form. I remained the heroine, but the hero no longer played different parts; he was always Friedrich von Hadeln again and again, only in different situations.

But the drollest thing about this schoolgirl romance is that next summer we really made the journey to Wiesbaden again, that we met Him there, and that he paid neither of us the least attention. This reality speedily sobered us. We did not laugh at each other as we deserved, for we had too much respect for the conflicts of soul that we had undergone; but we were cured. And in later years we laughed, too, over the story.

III
AN AUTOGRAPH ALBUM
Anastasius Grün · Friedrich Halm · Grillparzer · Wagner · Lenau’s sister · Military autographs · King Ludwig of Bavaria · Schiller’s daughter · Liebig · Schücking · Mädler · Körner · Anderssen · Meyerbeer · Rückert · Hebbel · Gregorovius · Lamartine · Victor Hugo · Manzoni · Dickens

I will still linger over that album. There sounds forth from the book, as it were, a whole chime of tones from the past; a whole procession of spirits—right illustrious spirits among them—goes by. Ah, that is the fine thing about youth, that it operates with as many hopes as old age does with memories; to it the joyous “will be” beckons from every quarter—to age the gloomy “has been” shows itself at all points.

So let us turn the leaves. Here is a letter from Anastasius Grün[^[4]] to Elvira, in its envelope. The poet writes:

Esteemed young Lady:

Your letter addressed to my dear wife bespeaks so unaffected a frame of mind, so noble an aspiration, and at the same time so tender and womanly a disposition, that it would in any case come very hard for me to decline the request addressed—properly speaking, to me—in so earnest a tone, even were it one less easy of fulfillment. Busied as I am at this moment, I must to-day limit myself to these few lines, that I may not again, as I lately did by inadvertency, miss a date set by you. I hope the opposite leaf [it is not in the album] may meet with a friendly reception from you.

With deep respect, esteemed young lady, your most humble servant

A. Auersperg

Graz, March 26, 1861.

Now a few more pages:

Es liebt Vortreffliches sich zu verstecken

That which is choicest loves to lie concealed,

And many a woman’s heart even to this day

Still hides within it an America

Which could by a Columbus be revealed.

Friedrich Halm

Vienna, July 17, 1861.

Der Dichter liegt seit lang begraben

The poet has lain buried long;

The man is living, for even now

The memory of thy sweet gifts of song

Doth me again with my lost youth endow.

Franz Grillparzer[^[5]]

Vienna, April 8, 1861.

Dem österreichischen Mädchen

[[audio/mpeg]]

Richard Wagner

Vienna, May 14, 1861.

A dry flower, and with it the inscription:

From my unfortunate brother’s grave.

Th. Schurz, sister of Lenau.

I can still remember the acquisition of this leaf of the album. Aunt Lotti, Elvira, and I had one afternoon gone on a pilgrimage to the hamlet where rest the ashes of Nikolaus Lenau,[^[6]] for whose melancholy poems Elvira cherished an enthusiasm. On this occasion we visited the poet’s sister, who was living in a little country-house not far from the graveyard. Frau Schurz told us much about the unhappy man’s last years, spent in incurable insanity, and showed us many relics, silhouettes of himself and of Sophie Löwenthal, the woman whom he had loved so passionately with a love not unreturned but unaccepted; and she herself took us to the graveyard to pick there the twig that I have now before my eyes.

Is it accident, or did Elvira know that Nikolaus Niembsch once meant to tear himself away from Sophie Löwenthal and to marry another who was also one of the great and famous figures of the time? At all events, on the following page of the album stands the following autograph:

Ich will, das Wort ist mächtig

“I will,” the word is mighty;

When spoken staunch and still,

It tears the stars from heaven,

The single word “I will!”

Karoline Sabatier-Ungher

Karlsbad, May, 1861

Yet it seems she did not speak it ernst und still enough, the beautiful singer, when it came to holding fast the greatly loved and already affianced Niembsch von Strehlenau; for he let her go and returned to Sophie.

Now comes a very strongly military leaf. It bears the signatures Schwarzenberg, Benedek, FML., Fürstenberg, G. d. C., v. Wrangel, Field Marshal.[^[7]] Alongside Wrangel’s name somebody (the insertion is not in Elvira’s hand) has inscribed the following brief dialogue reproducing the famous general’s wooing. It is well known that in spite of all his victories he never succeeded in conquering the dative and the accusative, and when he wanted to apply to the father of his intended for her hand the conversation in all probability developed itself thus:

“Will you call me your son-in-law?”

“I’m sorry, but I have none.”

“Beg pardon—I meant to say, may I call you my father-in-law?”

“Oh, you are married? I did not know that.”[^[8]]