Many passages in Heine’s Pictures of Travel breathe the spirit of the Young German propaganda—­the celebrated confession of faith, for example, in the Journey to the Hartz, in which he declares himself a knight of the holy spirit of iconoclastic democracy.  In Paris he actively enlisted in the cause, and for about fifteen years continued, as a journalist, the kind of expository and polemic writing that he had developed in the later volumes of the Pictures of Travel.  Regarding himself, like many an expatriate, as a mediator between the country of his birth and the country of his adoption, he wrote for German papers accounts of events in the political and artistic world of France, and for French periodicals more ambitious essays on the history of religion, philosophy, and recent literature in Germany.  Most of the works of this time were published in both French and German, and Heine arranged also for the appearance of the Pictures of Travel and the Book of Songs in French translations.  To all intents and purposes he became a Frenchman; from 1836 or 1837 until 1848 he was the recipient of an annual pension of 4,800 francs from the French government; he has even been suspected of having become a French citizen.  But he in no sense curbed his tongue when speaking of French affairs, nor was he free from longing to be once more in his native land.

In Germany, however, he was commonly regarded as a traitor; and at the same time the Young Germans, with the more influential of whom he soon quarreled, looked upon him as a renegade; so that there was a peculiar inappropriateness in the notorious decree of the Bundesrat at Frankfurt, voted December 10, 1835, and impotently forbidding the circulation in Germany of the writings of the Young Germans:  Heine, Gutzkow, Laube, Wienbarg, and Mundt—­in that order.  But the occupants of insecure thrones have a fine scent for the odor of sedition, and Heine was an untiring sapper and miner in the modern army moving against the strongholds of aristocrats and priests.  A keen observer in Hamburg who was resolved, though not in the manner of the Young Germans, to do his part in furthering social reform, Friedrich Hebbel, wrote to a friend in March, 1836:  “Our time is one in which action destined to be decisive for a thousand years is being prepared.  What artillery did not accomplish at Leipzig must now be done by pens in Paris.”

During the first years of his sojourn in Paris Heine entered gleefully into all the enjoyment and stimulation that the gay capital had to offer.  “I feel like a fish in water” is a common expression of contentment with one’s surroundings; but when one fish inquires after the health of another, he now says, Heine told a friend, “I feel like Heine in Paris.”  The well-accredited German poet quickly secured admission to the circle of artists, journalists, politicians, and reformers, and became a familiar figure on the boulevards.  In October,