THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
and the good time which must inevitably soon come, and would triumphantly carry us all back into the fatherland. And with all this she was tormented with a disease of the heart which caused her sometimes great suffering and the foreboding of an early death. One day, when I accompanied her on a walk, she suddenly stood still and clutched my arm. Her breath seemed to stop. I looked at her in terror. She had closed her eyes with an expression of pain. At last she opened her eyes again and said: “Did you hear my heart beat? I shall soon die. I can live hardly more than a year. But do not tell anybody. I did not mean to speak of it, but it has just now escaped me.” I tried to quiet her apprehensions, but in vain. “No,” she said, “I know it, but it does not matter. Now let us talk about something else.” Her presentiment was to come true only too quickly.
In the circle of the Brüning house there were some interesting and able men who had already proved their worth or were destined to prove it in later life. There was Loewe, who, shortly after I had met him in Switzerland, had left the Continent and sought a secure asylum in England. There was Count Oscar von Reichenbach of Silesia, a man of much knowledge and a thoroughly noble nature. There was Oppenheim, a writer of uncommon wit and large acquirements. There was Willich, the socialist leader, and Schimmelpfennig, two future American generals. The good Strodtmann, who had followed us to London, was frequently seen there. We also met there birds of passage of a different kind. One day a Frenchman from Marseilles, by the name of Barthélemi, was introduced, I do not remember by whom, in the Brüning salon and pointed out as a specially remarkable personage. His past had indeed been remarkable enough. Already before the revolution of 1848 he had taken part in a secret conspiracy, the so-called “Marianne,” had, after being designated by lot, killed a police officer, and
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