She bent over him, terribly distressed. Should she go? Should she ring again? Presently words came from his lips at intervals, abrupt, disconnected, and now a ribald laugh, and now a tearful sigh. And then he was a student humming: "Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus," and his death-mask lit up with the wild joys of living. And then earlier memories still--of his childhood in Düsseldorf--seemed to flow through his comatose brain; his mother and brothers and sisters; the dancing-master he threw out of the window; the emancipation of the Jewry by the French conquerors; the joyous drummer who taught him French; the passing of Napoleon on his white horse; the atheist school-boy friend with whom he studied Spinoza on the sly, and the country louts from whom he bought birds merely to set them free, and the blood-red hair of the hangman's niece who sang him folk-songs. And suddenly he came to himself, raised his eyelid with his forefinger and looked at her. "Catholic!" he cried angrily. "I never returned to Judaism, because I never left it. My baptism was a mere wetting. I have never put Heinrich--only H--on my books, and never have I ceased to write 'Harry' to my mother. Though the Jews hate me even more than the Christians, yet I was always on the side of my brethren." "I know, I know," she said soothingly. "I am sorry I hurt you. I remember well the passage in which you say that your becoming a Christian was the fault of the Saxons who changed sides suddenly at Leipzig; or else of Napoleon who had no need to go to Russia; or else of his school-master who gave him instruction at Brienne in geography, and did not tell him that it was very cold at Moscow in winter." "Very well, then," he said, pacified. "Let them not say either that I have been converted to Judaism on my death-bed. Was not my first poem based on one in the Passover night _Hagadah_? Was not my first tragedy, _Almansor_, really the tragedy of down-trodden Israel, that great race which from the ruins of its second Temple knew to save, not the gold and the precious stones, but its real treasure, the Bible--a gift to the world that would make the tourist traverse oceans to see a Jew, if there were only one left alive. The only people that preserved freedom of thought through the middle ages, they have now to preserve God against the free-thought of the modern world. We are the Swiss guards of Deism. God was always the beginning and end of my thought. When I hear His existence questioned, I feel as I felt once in your Bedlam when I lost my guide, a ghastly forlornness in a mad world. Is not my best work, _The Rabbi of Bacharach_, devoted to expressing the 'vast Jewish sorrow,' as Börne calls it?" "But you never finished it?"