kind enough to offer me the good excuse that your letter must have
been lost. No, I will confess the whole truth. I duly received
it--but at a time when I was up to my neck in a love affair that I
have not yet got out of. Since October nothing has been of any
account with me that was not directly connected with this. I have
neglected everything, I see nobody, and give a sigh whenever I think
of my friends.... So I have often sighed to think that you must
misunderstand my silence, yet I could not fairly set myself down to
write. And that is all I can tell you today; for my cheeks are in
such a flame, and my brain reels so with the scent of flowers, that I
am in no condition to talk sensibly to you.

"Did you ever read King Solomon's Song? Just read it, and you will
there find all I could say today."

So wrote Heine at the beginning of his love. When that love had
been living for eight years, he was still writing in no less
lover-like a fashion. "My wife," says he to his brother Max in a
letter dated April 12, 1843, "is a good child--natural, gay,
capricious, as only French women can be, and she never allows me for
one moment to sink into those melancholy reveries for which I have
so strong a disposition."

When Heine wrote this letter, Mathilde had been his "legal" wife for
something like a year and a half. Heine had resorted to the
formalizing of their union under the pressure of one of those
circumstances which compel a man to think more of a woman than of an
idea. He was going to fight a duel with one of his and her cowardly
German traducers, and that there should be no doubt of her position
in the event of his death, he duly married her. Writing to his