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Thanks to the ardour of Chamisso and Professor Eschscholtz, many specimens of natural history had been collected, and the latter published a description of more than 2000 animals, as well as some curious details on the mode of formation of the Coral islands in the South Seas.
He belonged to a family faithful to Louis XVI., that fled to Wurzburg from the fury of the French Revolution. Thus he was taken to Germany a child of nine, and was left there when the family, with other emigrants, returned to France in 1801. At fifteen he had Teutonised his name to Adelbert von Chamisso, and was appointed page to the Queen of Prussia.
There I found everything exactly in the order in which I had left it; and returned by degrees, as my increasing strength allowed me, to my old occupations and usual mode of life, from which I was kept back a whole year by my fall into the Polar Ocean. And this, dear Chamisso, is the life I am still leading.
The lagoon in Keeling atoll is shallow; in the atolls of the Low Archipelago the depth varies from 20 to 38 fathoms, and in the Marshall Group, according to Chamisso, from 30 to 35; in the Caroline atolls it is only a little less. Within the Maldiva atolls there are large spaces with 45 fathoms, and some soundings are laid down of 49 fathoms.
The noble Bendel also was crowned with flowers, and went past with a friendly greeting. I saw many besides, and I believe thee too, Chamisso, in the distant throng. A bright light appeared, but no one had a shadow, and, what was stranger, it had by no means a bad effect. Flowers and songs, love and joy, under groves of palm!
Like Hoffmann, Chamisso takes his reader into the midst of current life, but, unlike Hoffmann, his moods are not the dissolving views which leave the reader in doubt as to whether the whole is a phantasmagoria and a hallucination. Schlemihl is genuinely and consistently realistic. It is a story in the first person and has a rigidly logical arrangement of episodes leading up to its climax.
Because of their determination to study, Solomon Maimon was denied admission to Berlin, Manasseh of Ilye was stopped in Königsberg, and Abba Glusk Leczeka, better known as "the Glusker Maggid," the subject of a poem by Chamisso, was persecuted everywhere. It was Rabbi Levin, of Berlin, who prohibited the publication of Wessely's works, and insisted that the author be expelled from the city.
In the “Temptation of Jesus” by Lucas van Leyden the devil is habited as a monk with a pointed cowl. In the comparison of a soul with a shadow there is a reminiscence of Adalbert von Chamisso, whose Peter Schlemihl sells his shadow to the devil. In his story The Fisherman and His Soul Oscar Wilde considers the shadow of the body as the body of the soul.
Chamisso has described the natural history of a lagoon-island in the Radack Archipelago; and it is remarkable how closely its inhabitants, in number and kind, resemble those of Keeling Island. There is one lizard and two waders, namely, a snipe and curlew.
Think not so meanly of me, Chamisso, as to imagine that I would have shrunk from any sacrifice on my part. In such a case it would have been but a poor ransom. No, Chamisso; but my whole soul was filled with unconquerable hatred to the cringing knave and his crooked ways. I might be doing him injustice; but I shuddered at the bare idea of entering into any fresh compact with him.
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