London, 16 October 1864
Modena Villas, Maitland Park,
Haverstock Hill

My dear Countess,

In recent weeks I have been so seriously ill that I was obliged to
keep to my bed and hence, unfortunately, to defer until now my
reply to your friendly letter of 1 October.

I assure you that I still cannot bring myself to accept Lassalle’s
death as a fait accompli! I see him in my mind’s eye so full of life,
spirit, energy and plans, so very, very young, and now suddenly
his voice is silenced and his breath departed—lI find it impossible
to reconcile the two, to conceive of both simultaneously, and the
reality oppresses me like an awful, nightmarish dream.

You are quite right to imply that no one appreciated Lassalle’s
greatness and significance better than I. He himself was most
aware of this, as his letters to me show. As long as the
correspondence between us lasted, I always expressed to him my
heartfelt appreciation of his achievements, on the one hand, while
always frankly advising him of my criticisms and reservations
regarding those things I considered faulty, on the other.

In one of his last letters to me he wrote, in that peculiarly
forceful manner he had, of the satisfaction that this gave him. But,
apart from all his abilities, I felt affection for him as a person. The
pity is that we have always concealed this fact from one another, as
if we were going to live for ever...*