Then she ought to have been in love with Napoleon 1.," is the witty reply.

Lassalle, however, with infinite trouble, has to explain to his Helena that, from a worldly point of view, she must remain friends with the Countess on account of the allowance she gives him. So it is decided that they shall pay her a visit every year.

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Meanwhile Helena has to return to her parents at Geneva, where she found them all in a state of happy excitement on the subject of her sister's engagement to Count Kayserling. She took advantage of the temporary softness of her mother's manner to confess her own engagement to Lassalle, hoping that the brilliant choice her sister had made would induce them to give consent at least to theirs. But swiftly and suddenly did the dark clouds of unhappiness descend upon her. "What now ensued," she says, is so terrible, so sad, that my heart shudders and trembles when I endeavor to recall the memory of it." Her mother broke out into a flood of invectives, and went to fetch her father, who with threatening mien and trembling voice asked "what ridiculous story this was about this rascally democrat?" Fräulein von Doenniges, frightened at the storm she had brought upon herself, fled to take refuge with Lassalle, and implored him to take her away. He with melodramatic dignity refused to do so, and told her to have patience and he would win her yet, openly and loyally as his wife. At that moment the excited mother, having discovered her daughter's hiding-place,

rushed in, and Lassalle delivered her daughter back into her hands. 'A kiss, a pressure of the hand," she says-" my lover was gone, and I never saw him again." With all her vanity and frivolity, we cannot help, for the first time, feeling a sort of sympathy for poor Helena thus left to the mercy of her mother and father, who proceeded to personal violence while conducting her home. She was there locked in her room, and told by her enraged parents that she should remain a prisoner until she came to her senses.

We find Lassalle at this time writing to the Countess Hatzfeldt as his "best and only friend," and telling her that he was so unhappy that he wept for the first time for fifteen years. "You are the only one that knows what it means when I tell you that I, the iron-one, writhe under my sufferings like a worm. We are afraid, however, that the tears he shed were rather those of resentment and baffled endeavor than those of grief and sorrow at the loss of the woman he loved.

He had the consciousness that if he took this affair in humility and with resignation, the pride that had kept him strong in so many conflicts would be broken, and his belief in his "star" extinguished for ever.

"Soon," he writes, "shall I go down into the earth-not through the brutal strength that

I have so often overcome, but through the boundless treachery, through the unprecedent

ed inconstancy and frivolity of a woman that I loved above and beyond all things."

Fräulein von Doenniges was hardly of the stuff martyrs are made of. According to her own account, she submitted to unheard-of persecutions for her lover's sake, and only yielded after a long period of resistance. According to Lassalle's friends, she gave up the cause at once, and consented to sign and write whatever they told her. Indeed, by her own confession, we ascertain that she received frequent visits from Yanko von Racowitza at this period. She calls the feeling she nourished for her rejected suitor "objective sympathy;" we prefer to call it by its true name, heartless coquetry and instability of character, especially when we find her engaging herself to the prince, and in a conversation held with two friends of Ferdinand's

in the presence of her father, formally rejecting the offer of his hand, and wording her rejection in the most insulting

terms.

"If those foolish, abrupt, incredibly heartless words," she writes in these memoirs, "which were later put in my mouth, were really made by me, they can only be excused by my excited and intense repulsion toward Rüstow (one of Lassalle's friends); and on going to my room I determined to write to Haenle that evening, and tell him that I was as faithful as ever to Lassalle, and that I wished him to tell him so, when Yanko came to me, knelt down, and said softly, 'It is no use; Haenle has left for Munich.' 'Gone?' said. Yes; and Lassalle has challenged your father to fight!' Lassalle! the declared enemy of duelling! He on whom I have always depended. A chaos of doubt and despair descended on my soul. I was beside myself."

The actress, accustomed all her life to mock jewelry, paint-pots, and tinsel, is at last awakened out of her artificiality and falseness to the stern realities surrounding her, the shadow of sorrow and death already falls on her perjured, cowardly soul. Her father refused to fight, and left precipitately for Berne, and on the poor, much-despised Yanko fell the responsibility of defending his lady

love's honor.

"I felt sure Yanko, who had accepted Lassalle's challenge, would be killed, for he had absolutely never held a weapon in his hand, his delicate health having obliged him to abstain from anything of the kind, while Lassalle was a well-known shot, but I hardly even felt pity for him, my only friend. My one idea was to get to Ferdinand. I would have trampled them all under foot to run away with my lover."

This from a woman who had formally renounced him three days before.

"That night I made all the necessary preparations for my intended flight, burnt all compromising letters, put a few things into a handbag, and put on two dresses, one over the other, so as to be prepared for several days' absence."

We all of us know the rest.

The duel took place with pistols on the 28th of August, 1864, at Carrouge, near Geneva.

Racowitza fired first: Lassalle fell mortally wounded, and in spite of all the medical skill that was called in, he never rallied, and after lying for three days in frightful agony-which the doctors endeavored, ineffectually, to relieve with morphia-he passed away on the

31st, conscious to the last, recognizing his friends, and holding the hand of the Countess clasped in his.

During this time Helen's sufferings and anxiety were indescribable.

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I heard those around me whispering, ́ he is suffering tortures, they have given him opium.' Three days passed in this suspense, until at ten o'clock on the morning of the third, Yanko entered my room, and begged me to come with him into the garden, saying that he had something important to tell me. When we got there, he turned, pale and frightened, and said, Lassalle is dead.'

"At first I did not breathe, but as he re

peated it, the certainty forced itself on my mind, and I was only able to stammer out, " Leave me,' and then sank almost unconscious on the nearest seat, as if I myself were struck down by a mortal illness. I did not recover from the shock for months-indeed, the effects of it lasted for years. My first sensation was an impulse of hatred against Yanko; but at last a sort of pity overcame this feeling. My resentment toward my parents, however, increased in intensity; and, glad to escape from their influence, I married Racowitza six months afterward, and nursed him with devotion and care until his death, which soon followed."

And for such a woman was a life that at one time had been full of energy and promise, thrown away.

"I declare that I myself have caused my end. Ferdinand Lassalle." was found written on a slip of paper, in the breast-pocket of the wounded man, and there is no doubt that by his arrogance and vanity he had brought about the events that terminated so fatally.

There is something touching, knowing the real facts of the case, to see the sort of worship which has been bestowed upon this new messiah by some of his countrymen. "Todtenfeieren," or commemoration services, were instituted in his honor, at which he was talked of as the "Mighty Titan, who never died, who freed us from darkness and error, who brought light into the wilderness of our times," etc. Many of the working men," Becker adds, "believed that Lassalle had died for them, and surrounded his memory with the halo of martyrdom."

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He did not, alas, live to see one single thought or theory for which he had worked and longed become a reality. His grave lay at the entrance of a bloody path, along which New Germany has passed" with tempestuous steps."

He had started with dreams of the

perfection of social organization which was to bring about the Golden Age, dreamed of by philosophers and poets, but "the key to effective life is unity of life," Mr. Morley says, " and unity of life means, more than anything else, the unity of our human relations. Is not every incentive and every concession to vagrant appetites a force that enwraps a man in gratification of self-severs him from duty to others, and so becomes a force of dissolution and dispersion?" But, after all, is it just or reasonable to confine ourselves to the observation of the faults and foibles of a truly great soul? Let us rather judge him in his real power and strength by these words, taken from his own drama of "Frantz von Sickingen :"

'Look not to earth, Balthazar, look above. In deepest need does man's whole energy First show itself. Then from his struggling

soul

All earth-born doubts which drag him down

are chased,

And, then, from out the shipwreck's scattered spars,

And from the ruins of its vain deceit,
The spirit rises purified and great
Toward the Eternal, which doth ever lurk
Within the nobler, better part of man,
And, setting down the sum of all his life,
He shakes the burden off his valiant breast,
And rushes forth to fight where duty calls."

But what is our opinion of the woman who has published these confessions? There are only two motives which can induce the performance of such a work

either the wish to make the pretended confession an apology; or the passion that possesses some women to get themselves talked about in any way, and which is thus expressed by a witty Frenchman, "Nous nous soucions plus qu'on parle de nous, que comment on en parle."

There is little doubt that she never intended to marry Ferdinand Lassalle, and simply listened to his passionate avowals of love because it flattered her vanity to think that one of the most remarkable men of the day was at her feet. But immediately she had to suffer any persecution for his sake, she gave him up without effort or regret.

She had been the "Golden Fox," the object of adoration of "this Jew," as she calls him; she had gazed at the moon and watched the stars in his com

pany, and sounded all the notes on the keyboard of the tender passion; but directly he wanted to marry her, she threw him over without a moment's compunction, and six months after his death married Yanko von Racowitza.

We do not think we need say more to prove the truth of her own words, in which she states that several years before she met Lassalle she had lost the power of discriminating between right and wrong.

Let her pass away into the insignificance from which the ill-fated love of a noteworthy man had for an instant called her.-Temple Bar.