Lay Down Your Arms

I

Girlish Days and Girlish Fancies⁠—Youthful Enthusiasm for War⁠—Education⁠—“Coming Out”⁠—An Important Visit to Marienbad⁠—Love at First Sight⁠—Marriage⁠—A First Child⁠—The Baby-Soldier⁠—Threatenings of War⁠—Declaration of War with Sardinia⁠—My Husband Is to See Active Service.

At seventeen I was a thoroughly overwrought creature. This perhaps I should no longer be aware of today, if it were not that my diaries have been preserved. But in them the enthusiasms long since fled, the thoughts which have never been thought again, the feelings never again felt have immortalised themselves, and thus I can judge at this present time what exalted notions had stuck in my silly, pretty head. Even this prettiness, of which my glass has now little left to say, is revealed to me by the portraits of long ago. I can figure to myself what an envied person the Countess Martha Althaus⁠—youthful, thought beautiful, and surrounded by all kinds of luxury⁠—must have been. These remarkable diaries, however, bound in their red covers, point more to melancholy than to joy in life. The question I now ask myself is, Was I really so silly as not to recognise the advantages of my position or was I only so enthusiastic as to believe that only melancholy feelings were elevated and worthy of being expressed in poetical form and as such enrolled in the red volumes? My lot seems not to have contented me⁠—for thus is it written:⁠—