"With all imaginable torture, cruelly break my limbs, but do not keep
me waiting, for of all torments disappointed expectation is the most
painful. I expected thee all yesterday afternoon until six o'clock,
but thou didst not come, thou witch, and I grew almost mad.
Impatience encircled me like the folds of a viper, and I bounded on
my couch at every ring, but oh! mortal anguish, it did not bring thee.
"Thou didst fail to come; I fret, I fume, and Satanas whispered
mockingly in my ear--'The charming lotus-flower makes fun of thee,
thou old fool!'"
"Camille Selden" made the mistake of her life when she imagined that
Heine loved her, and did not love that somewhat stout and
High-coloured Mme. Heine who had such bad taste in lace and literature.
Mathilde, as we know, was far from being Heine's first love. She was
more important--his last. Heine himself tells us that from his
boyhood he had been dangerously susceptible to women. He had tried
many cures for the disease, but finally came to the conclusion that
"woman is the best antidote to woman", though--"to be sure, this is
driving out Satan with Beelzebub." There had been many loves in
Heine's life before, one day in the Quarrier Latin, somewhere in the
year 1835, he had met saucy, laughing Mathilde Crescence Mirat.
There had been "red Sefchen," the executioner's daughter, whose red
hair as she wound it round her throat fascinated Heine with its grim
suggestion of blood.
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