It
was too soon to expect them, she said, and then she showed him her plan,
which she had been working out ever since she woke. It contained every
place which Heine had mentioned, and she was determined not one should
escape them. She examined him sharply upon his condition, accusing him of
having taken cold when he got up in the night, and acquitting him with
difficulty. She herself was perfectly well, but a little fagged, and they
must have a carriage.
They set out in a lordly two-spanner, which took up half the little
Bolkerstrasse where Heine was born, when they stopped across the way from
his birthhouse, so that she might first take it all in from the outside
before they entered it. It is a simple street, and not the cleanest of
the streets in a town where most of them are rather dirty. Below the
houses are shops, and the first story of Heine's house is a butcher shop,
with sides of pork and mutton hanging in the windows; above, where the
Heine family must once have lived, a gold-beater and a frame-maker
displayed their signs.
But did the Heine family really once live there? The house looked so
fresh and new that in spite of the tablet in its front affirming it the
poet's birthplace, they doubted; and they were not reassured by the
people who half halted as they passed, and stared at the strangers, so
anomalously interested in the place.
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