Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 6.djvu/212

 LAFAYETTE (1833)

By Heinrich Heine

TRANSLATED BY CHARLES GODFREY LELAND

, January 19, 1832.

HE Temps remarks today that, the Allgemeine Zeitung now publishes articles which are hostile to the royal family, and that the German censorship, which does not permit the least remark to be leveled at absolute kings, does not show the least mercy toward a citizen-king. The Temps is really the shrewdest and cleverest journal in the world! It attains its object with a few mild words much more readily than others with the most blustering polemics. Its crafty hint is well understood, and I know of at least one liberal writer who no longer considers it honorable to use, under the permission of the censorship, such inimical language of a citizen-king as would not be allowed when applied to an absolute monarch. But in return for that, let Louis Philippe do us one single favor—which is to remain a citizen-king; for it is because he is becoming every day more and more like an absolute king that we must complain of him. He is certainly perfectly honorable as a man, an estimable father of a family, a tender spouse and a good economist, but it is vexatious to see how he allows all the trees of liberty to be felled and stripped of their beautiful foliage that they may be sawed into beams to support the tottering house of Orleans. For that, and that only, the Liberal press blames him, and the spirits of truth, in order to make war on him, even condescend to lie. It is melancholy and lamentable that through such tactics even the family of the King must suffer, although its members are as innocent as they are amiable. As regards this, the German Liberal press, less witty but much kinder than its French elder sister, is guilty of no cruelties. "You should at least have pity on the King," lately cried the good-

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