Lassalle had joined his intellectual forces with those of Heine and Marx.  He had obtained so great an influence over the masses of the people as to alarm many a monarch, and at the same time to attract many a statesman.  Prince Bismarck, for example, cared nothing for Lassalle’s championship of popular rights, but sought his aid on finding that he was an earnest advocate of German unity.

Furthermore, he was very far from resembling what in those early days was regarded as the typical picture of a Socialist.  There was nothing frowzy about him; in his appearance he was elegance itself; his manners were those of a prince, and his clothing was of the best.  Seeing him in a drawing-room, no one would mistake him for anything but a gentleman and a man of parts.  Hence it is not surprising that his second love was one of the nobility, although her own people hated Lassalle as a bearer of the red flag.

This girl was Helene von Donniges, the daughter of a Bavarian diplomat.  As a child she had traveled much, especially in Italy and in Switzerland.  She was very precocious, and lived her own life without asking the direction of any one.  At twelve years of age she had been betrothed to an Italian of forty; but this dark and pedantic person always displeased her, and soon afterward, when she met a young Wallachian nobleman, one Yanko Racowitza, she was ready at once to dismiss her Italian lover.  Racowitza—­young, a student, far from home, and lacking friends—­appealed at once to the girl’s sympathy.

At that very time, in Berlin, where Helene was visiting her grandmother, she was asked by a Prussian baron: 

“Do you know Ferdinand Lassalle?”

The question came to her with a peculiar shock.  She had never heard the name, and yet the sound of it gave her a strange emotion.  Baron Korff, who perhaps took liberties because she was so young, went on to say: 

“My dear lady, have you really never seen Lassalle?  Why, you and he were meant for each other!”

She felt ashamed to ask about him, but shortly after a gentleman who knew her said: 

“It is evident that you have a surprising degree of intellectual kinship with Ferdinand Lassalle.”

This so excited her curiosity that she asked her grandmother: 

“Who is this person of whom they talk so much—­this Ferdinand Lassalle?”

“Do not speak of him,” replied her grandmother.  “He is a shameless demagogue!”

A little questioning brought to Helene all sorts of stories about Lassalle—­the Countess von Hatzfeldt, the stolen casket, the mysterious pamphlet, the long battle in the courts—­all of which excited her still more.  A friend offered to introduce her to the “shameless demagogue.”  This introduction happened at a party, and it must have been an extraordinary meeting.  Seldom, it seemed, was there a better instance of love at first sight, or of the true affinity of which Baron Korff had spoken.  In the midst of the public gathering they almost rushed into each other’s arms; they talked the free talk of acknowledged lovers; and when she left, he called her love-names as he offered her his arm.