Note 188 — VII. THE PRIVATE LIFE OF FERDINAND LASSALLE [185]

The most concise account of the affair is contained in the story of Sophie Solutzeff, entitled, Eine Liebes-episode aus dem Leben Ferdinand Lassalle’s. This booklet, which is published in German, French, and Russian, professes to be an account of Lassalle’s love for a young Russian lady, Sophie Solutzeff, some two years before he met Helene von Dönniges. He is represented as being himself in a frenzy of passion; the lady, however, rejecting as a lover the man she had been prepared to worship as a teacher. There can be little doubt that the whole story is a fabrication, in which the Countess von Hatzfeldt had a considerable part. The Countess was rightly judged by popular opinion to have played a discreditable rôle in the love passages between Lassalle and Helene; and Helene’s own account of the matter in her Reminiscences was an additional blow at the pseudo-friend who might have helped the lovers so much. What more natural than that the Countess should be anxious to break the force of Helene’s indictment, by endorsing the popular, and indeed accurate judgment, that Lassalle was very inflammable where women were concerned. This she could do by depicting him, a little earlier, in precisely similar bondage to that which he had professed to Helene. That the Countess wrote, or assisted to write, the compilation of letters and diaries, does not, however, destroy its value as a record of Lassalle’s struggle on her behalf. That account, if not written by Lassalle, was written or inspired by the other great actor in the Hatzfeldt drama, and may therefore be considered a fairly safe guide in recounting the story. Mr. Israel Zangwill, since the above was written, has published an article on Lassalle in his Dreamers of the Ghetto. He accepts Sophie Solutzeff’s story as genuine, but that is merely the credulity of an accomplished romancer.