Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/603

 be bred and nourished any sort of iove, heterosexual or homosexual; often purely such stuff as dreams are made of. As to the end of the "Federigo" affair, it never completely ended; as has been mentioned. The blessed image of the young cuirasssier [sic] of Munich remained in Platen's heart all through his career, especially in Munich. Even at the Universities, it tormented him or thrilled him. It was a sort of permanent criterion of the depth of his sentiments for his later flames.

Just at this time, in Munich, and during the march to France, Platen's love-friendship (the. grade of that special feeling in Platen is hard to characterize here) with his brother-officer, Perglas was in course. As has been said, it was anything but a smooth course. Perglas and he could not part psychically, and did not, till death removed, Perglas untimely from the world; but they never came really together. There is excellent reason to believe that a certain mysterious episode in Perglas's officer-life in Munich, rather later (in the winter of 1817)—his desertion from the garrison and from duty, for some days, his disappearance and his return, in a pitiable state of shattered nerves, was a meditated plan of suicide, because of sexual depression. It was an incident in which Platen behaved to his friend with brotherly care and judgment. But to the last there is no record of a due degree of confidence between this strange pair, even when an hour of mutual disclosure might be expected.

But a new personage was now to appear on the scene for this idealistic poet-soldier. Like the matter of Mercy d'Argenteau, or of Prince Oettengen-Waller stein, or of Brandenstein, this affair, was sheer idealism, concentrated on a handsome comrade's exterior. Inasmuch as a brief personal acquaintance really was at least the finale of it, it was a trifle more concrete than its predecessors. Among