Your faithful B.



Berlin, Tuesday Morning, May 18, '47.

_Dearest_,--The last letters from Reinfeld permit me to hope that your
illness is not so threatening at the moment as I feared from the first
news, although I am continually beset by all possible fears about you,
and thus am in a condition of rather complicated restlessness. * * *
My letter in which I told you of my election you have understood
somewhat, and your dear mother altogether, from a point of view
differing from that which was intended. I only wanted to make my
position exactly clear to you, and the apologies which to you seemed
perhaps forced, as I infer from your mother's letter, you may regard
as an entirely natural outflow of politeness. That I did not stand in
need of justification with you I very well know; but also that it must
affect us both painfully to see our fine plans cancelled. It was my
ardent wish to be a member of the Landtag; but that the Landtag and
you are fifty miles apart distressed me in spite of the fulfilment of
my wish. You women are, and always will be, unaccountable, and it is
better to deal with you by word of mouth than by writing. * * * I have
ventured once or twice on the speaker's platform with a few words, and
yesterday raised an unheard-of storm of displeasure, in that, by a
remark which was not explained clearly enough touching the character
of the popular uprising of 1813, I wounded the mistaken vanity of many
of my own party, and naturally had all the halloo of the opposition
against me. The resentment was great, perhaps for the very reason that
I told the truth in applying to 1813 the sentence that any one (the
Prussian people) who has been thrashed by another (the French) until