There had been his cousin Amalie, whose
marriage to another is said to have been the secret spring of sorrow
by which Heine's laughter was fed. And there had been others, whose
names--imaginary, maybe, in that they were doubtless the imaginary
names of real women--are familiar to all readers of Heines poetry:
Seraphine, Angelique, Diane, Hortense, Clarisse, Emma, and so on.
But she is loved best who is loved last; and when, after those months
of delirious dissipation in Paris, which all too soon were to be so
exorbitantly paid for by years of suffering, Heine met Mathilde,
there is no doubt at all that Heine met his wife. His reminiscent
fancy might sentimentalize about his lost Amalie, but no one can read
his letters, not so much to, as about, Mathilde without realizing
that he came as near to loving her as a man of his temperament can
come near to loving any one.
Though, to begin with, they were not married in the conventional
sense, but "kept house" together in the fashion of the Quarter,
there seems no question that Heine was faithful to Mathilde--to whom
in his letters to his friends he always referred as his "wife"--and
that their relation, in everything but name, was a true marriage.
Just before he met Mathilde, Heine had written to his friend and
publisher, Campe, that he was at last sick to death of the poor
pleasures which had held him too long. "I believe," he writes,
"that my soul is at last purified of all its dross; henceforth my
verses will be the more beautiful, my books the more harmonious.
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