But, as we learn from some of his own accounts, he now fell in love. Indeed, if we are to believe the tales he tells of himself in his “Dorothea,” which was written in his youth and printed with the sanction of his old age, he suffered great extremity from that passion when he was only seventeen. Some of the stories of that remarkable dramatic romance, in which he figures under the name of Fernando, are, it may be hoped, fictitious;[208] though it must be admitted that others, like the scene between the hero and Dorothea, in the first act, the account of his weeping behind the door with Marfisa, on the day she was to be married to another, and most of the narrative parts in the fourth act, have an air of reality about them that hardly permits us to doubt they were true.[209] Taken together, however, they do him little credit as a young man of honor and a cavalier. [208] See Dorotea, Acto I. sc. 6, in which, having coolly made up his mind to abandon Marfisa, he goes to her and pretends he has killed one man and wounded another in a night brawl, obtaining by this base falsehood the unhappy creature’s jewels, which he needed to pay his expenses, and which she gave him out of her overflowing affection. [209] Act. I. sc. 5, and Act. IV. sc. 1, have a great air of reality about them. But other parts, like that of the discourses and troubles that came from giving to one person the letter intended for another, are quite too improbable and too much like the inventions of some of his own plays, to be trusted. (Act. V. sc. 3, etc.) M. Fauriel, however, whose opinion on such subjects is always to be respected, regards the whole as true. Revue des Deux Mondes, Sept. 1, 1839.