8 - Cold warrior

Summary

England and the English appear in many guises in Heine's letters and recorded conversations of the 1830s. There is his put-down remark to English visitors who were conducting a conversation in their native language in the reading-room of a Boulogne library: ‘I hope, ladies, that your conversation will not be troubled by my reading the papers’; but that gives only one side of the picture, for it was at Boulogne, too, that Heine met Sarah Austin and her little daughter Lucie, who later, when she had become Lucie Duff-Gordon, set down some delightful reminiscences about her meetings with Heine:

I had known him above twenty years ago as a child of eleven or twelve at Boulogne, where I sat next him at a table d'hôte. He was then a fat, short man – shortsighted, and with a sensual mouth. He heard me speak German to my mother, and soon began to talk to me, and then said, ‘When you go to England you can tell your friends that you have seen Heinrich Heine.’ I replied, ‘And who is Heinrich Heine?’ He laughed heartily, and took no offence at my ignorance, and we used to lounge on the end of the pier together, where he told me stories in which fish, mermaids, watersprites, and a very funny old French fiddler with a poodle, who was diligently taking three sea baths a day, were mixed up in the most fanciful manner, sometimes humorous, and very often pathetic, especially when the watersprites brought him German greetings from the ‘Nord See’. […]