r wives have become common property, whom
they sell and exchange and seduce mutually. The women are so corrupted
that even ladies of noble birth degrade themselves by becoming
procuresses and panderers, to attract young women of rank in order to
procure their seduction. One finds in the public houses true Vestal
virgins as compared with many distinguished ladies who are the leaders
in society. There are women of high rank who are not ashamed to sit in
the theatre on the benches of public women, to procure for themselves
lovers to go home with them. Many dissolute women of rank even unite and
hire furnished quarters in company, whither they invite their lovers,
and celebrate without restraint bacchanalia and orgies which would have
been unknown even to the regent of France. Since Berlin is the central
point of the monarchy from which all good and evil spreads over the
provinces, the corruption has gradually expanded even thither."
Forsooth, the ignominious defeat of Jena was indeed quietly preparing
many years before it took place.

Prince Louis Ferdinand, a cousin of the king, a chameleon-like
character, composed of some good and many evil qualities, who is still
sung in German folklore, owing to his heroic death on the battlefield
against Napoleon, was an exponent of that frivolous life. Like his
prototype, the Athenian Alcibiades, he was a devotee now to wine, woman,
song, now to the strenuous life of a brave soldier and heroic patriot.
One woman of wonderful beauty and of the temper of a Messalina, to use
Scherr's words, Pauline Wiesel, held him under her demoniacal sway of
never satisfied passion. But a woman of an entirely different type, the
extraordinary Jewish authoress, and ingenious, spirited
conversationalist and epistolographer, Rahel Levin, served him as a true
Egeria in pure friendship and intellectual affinity. Rahel Levin is a
great factor in the later time of restoration and one of its foremost
personalities. Rahel, as the wife of Varnhagen von Ense, and Bettina von
Arnim are the leaders of those women who exercised such a tremendous
influence in the evolution of German womanhood during the first half of
the eighteenth century. Their influence is enduring and makes even
to-day for good.

It is incumbent upon us to retrace our steps to give a more orderly
account of the literary, intellectual, and artistic woman. The
initiators of that class, the Gottschedin and the Neuberin have been
mentioned. Since