Things stood badly now with Kleist--no comfort in public life, no prospects in private life, no money, no employment, no approbation, no encouragement. His nearest and dearest did not appreciate him. Shortly before his death he writes to a motherly friend: "I would rather die ten times over than endure again what I lately endured in Frankfort, sitting at the dinner-table between my two sisters. The thought that what I have actually done, be it little or much, is not acknowledged by them at all, that I am looked upon as an utterly useless member of society, no longer worthy of the slightest sympathy, not only robs me of the future, but poisons the past to me." Unwilling as he was to return to a profession he had given up twelve years before, it at last seemed to him that the only possible way in which he could earn his bread was by re-entering the army. He did not even own money enough to procure an officer's outfit. An appeal to Hardenberg for assistance was left unanswered. It was exactly at this time that Prussia was compelled to enter into an alliance with Napoleon against Russia. Can one imagine greater "confusion of feeling" than was now the lot of the unhappy patriot? The author of the _Hermannsschlacht_, the mortal enemy of Napoleon, forced, as a Prussian officer, to fight for the humiliator of his country! This last collision of duties broke his heart. "My soul is so spent," he writes, "that I feel as if the very daylight that shines on me when I put my head out at the window hurts me." He was ripe for the irrevocable decision. Through Müller he had made the acquaintance of Frau Henriette Vogel, a gifted woman, who, like himself, suffered from melancholia, and who imagined that she had an incurable disease. This lady reminded him one day, that in an early stage of their friendship he had promised to do anything she might require of him, let it be what it might. He replied that he was ready at any moment to fulfil his promise. "Then kill me," she said. "My sufferings are so great that I can no longer endure life. I don't believe, though, for a moment that you will do it--the men of to-day are not men at all." This was enough for Kleist. In November 1811 he and Henrietta drove together to a little inn on the shore of the Wannsee, a small lake near Potsdam. They were apparently in the best of spirits, full of jest and merriment all that day and until the afternoon of the next, when they went down to a retired spot on the shore, and Kleist shot his friend through the left breast and himself through the head. They had previously written a strange, mournfully humorous letter to Adam Müller's wife. It runs as follows:--