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With an accommodating chaperon who knew no German, the couple could do and say what they pleased. Lassalle, throwing off the heavy burdens of prophet and politician, alternated between brilliant lover and happy-hearted boy. It was almost a honeymoon. Now they were children with all the overflowing endearments of plighted lovers.

"That is not my fault, my dear Friedland," said Lassalle suavely. "It takes some brain to follow even what I have put so clearly. What have you there?" "The lecture to the artisans, for which you have to go to gaol for four months," said the outraged ornament of Prague society, which he illumined as well as adorned, having, in fact, the town's gas-contract. "Not so fast.

Into this heavy English atmosphere he brings not only the shimmer of ideas and wit, but a Heine of action the fantasy of personal adventure, and when audacity has been crowned by empery of dramatic surprises of policy. A successful Lassalle, he flutters the stagnant castes of aristocracy by the supremacy of the individual Will.

A scandalous pamphlet, which was published in French, German, and Russian, and written by one who styled herself "Sophie Solutzeff," did much to spread the evil report concerning Lassalle.

In truth, there was no real scandal in the matter, for the countess was twice the age of Lassalle. It was precisely because he was so young that he let his eagerness to defend a woman in distress make him forget the ordinary usage of society, and expose himself to mean and unworthy criticism which lasted all his life.

Lassalle traced the development of the German laws of inheritance from the Roman concept of the immortality of the legal personality. Marx would have derived them from the conditions of life among the Germans themselves. In Franz von Sickingen and his cause Lassalle thought he saw a glimpse of the revolutionary spirit of modern times.

Returning to Berlin in the spring of 1846, Lassalle signalized the attainment of his majority by espousing the cause of the Countess von Hatzfeld, then in the midst of her suits for divorce and for an accounting of her property. It was a characteristic act. The Countess' troubles arose through no fault of his.

Great thinkers all down the ages, from Plato to Sir Thomas More, from More to Jean Jacques Rousseau, from Rousseau to Saint Simon, Fourier, Louis Blanc, Lassalle, and Karl Marx, have devoted their attention to it. The French Revolutionists tried to solve it, and the revolutionary movement of 1848 took up the problem in its turn.

Lassalle felt that the test-moment of his life had come, and the man of action must rise to it. He scribbled three telegrams one to his mother, one to his sister, Frau Friedland, and one to the Countess, asking all to come at once. "You must have a chaperon," he interjected. "And till one of the three arrives, who is there here?" She sobbed out the address of Madame Rognon.

With a cunning that often supplies the loss of reason with the insane, she contrived snares, into which three of the assassins fell, and, with the singular implement her fancy had suggested, was the means of their death. Chance led to the failure of her plan for punishing the last of the assassins, Lassalle, and to her discovery by her brother.