Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/390

 details of it were of course still unknown to the general public, but that sort of mystery is notoriously favorable to the formation of legends, and the Liberal newspapers in Germany had vied with one another in romantic stories about the adventure. The favorite and most accredited of those fables represented me like Blondel before the dungeons of Richard Cœur de Lion, attracting the attention of the imprisoned friend, not indeed with the lute of a troubadour, but in my case with a barrel organ, and thus detecting the window of his cell, and then effecting his escape in a marvelous way. Another myth brought me in communication with a Prussian princess, who, in a mysterious, and to herself very perilous, manner, had advanced my undertaking. Several newspapers put before their readers my biography, which consisted in great part of fantastic inventions, inasmuch as there was but little to say of my young life. I even became the subject of poetic effusions, which celebrated me in all sorts of sentimental exaggeration. My parents, as they afterwards wrote me, were fairly flooded with congratulations, which in great part came from persons entirely unknown to them. Of course, the praise I received from my parents and the gratitude expressed by Frau Kinkel and her children were a real and a great satisfaction to me, but the extravagances which I had to read in German papers and to hear in the constantly extending circle of our acquaintance in Paris, disquieted me seriously. What I had done had appeared to me as nothing so extraordinary as to merit all this ado. Then there was also constantly present to my mind the thought, that without the help of a group of faithful friends, and especially without Brune's bold resolution at the decisive moment, all my efforts would have been in vain. And of Brune, who in those days was subject to a sharp and