THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1295, 25 November 1911, Page 11

THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS.

j ■ , WHAT BECAME OF ONE. When-the suicide of tho onco beautiful author and actress, Helene von Donnigos, shocked tho public a few weeks ago, "The .Times" related very lucidly the story her iiatno recalls ol" the last love affair, and tragic end ni Ferdinand Lassalle, founder of tho German Socialistic movement:— "Headers of George Meredith (it said) will scarcely need to bo reminded of 'tho bare railway line of the story.' as set forth with closo adherence to the facts in 'Tho Tragic Comedians.' She was tho daughter of a Gorman diplomat, and Lassalle met her, and was fascinated by tho originality of her character and by her talents, at .first in society in Berlin, and afterwards I among the mountains in Switzerland; her j father being then resident in Geneva. Fn 11S61 they betrothed themselves, but the j young lady's- father would not hear of 11 union between his daughter and Las;alle, and eventually, yielding to paternal pressure, .which was. carried to tho extent of physical restraint, Fraulein von Bonniges gave up her lover, and became engaged to tho Wallachian Count von Eacowitza. 1 Lassallc challenged both father and rival; j the challenge was accepted by the'latter, and Lassalle was mortally wounded at the meeting, which took place in a suburb of Genera on August \!S, 1864. Marriage \yjth Eacowitza followed, and after his death sho united to the Hungarian actor, Siegwart Priedmann—under whose auspices she went upon tho German stago, and from whom sho separated, the marriage being legally void—and, in the United States, where she pursued both a literary and a stage career, to a Russian writer, Baron von Schewitsch. Her third husband died quite recently at Munich, and a few days later, overcome, it is said, by grief and by financial difficulties, sho committed suicide by taking chloral hydrate. In 1883 she published 'My Relations with.Lassalle , .' She was the author of two novels published ■ respectively in 18S2 and 1892 and an autobiography was published in an English translation-last year."