"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
friend Lewald once more, on the 13th of October, 1841, he says: "You
will have learned that, a few days before the duel, to make
Mathilde's position secure, I felt it right to turn my free marriage
into a lawful one. This conjugal duel, which will never cease till
the death of one or the other of us, is far more perilous than any
brief meeting with a Solomon Straus of Jew Lane, Frankfort."
His friend Campe had been previously advised of "my marriage with the
lovely and honest creature who has lived by my side for years as
Mathilde Heine; was always respected and looked upon as my wife, and
was defiled by foul names only by some scandal-loving Germans of the
Frankfort clique."
Heine's duel resulted in nothing more serious than a flesh-wound on
the hip.
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