The other surprising passion was for Heine's _Buch der Lieder_, then just published. It was all very well for the old reactionary to call the audacious poet a "crazy adventurer;" he could not resist his sorcery. "I am still," he writes, "refreshing myself with the _Buch der Lieder_. Like Prokesch, I bathe for hours in these melancholy waters. Even the poems which verge upon actual blasphemy I cannot read without the most profound emotion; I sometimes blame myself that I so often and gladly return to them." His receptive nature could not withstand them. He has rightly described himself as a woman. In a strain which reminds us of the hermaphroditic traits in _Lucinde_, he writes to Rahel: "Do you know the reason why the relation between us is such a perfect one? I will tell you. It is because you are an infinitely productive and I am an infinitely receptive being: you are a great man; I am the first of all the women who have ever lived." He was now so nervous that a vigorous handclasp would alarm him; even the sight of a martial moustache was enough to disquiet him. In well-intentioned travellers who came to make his acquaintance he saw assassins in disguise. In the last year of his life his back was bent, his gait timorous and unsteady. The clear, sagacious eyes, for which he had been remarkable as a youth, were now, as it were, veiled by their furtive expression. In company he fortified himself by wearing large black spectacles. One day at a fête, Fanny Elsler, presenting him with a foaming glass of champagne which she had tasted, said teasingly: "Der Krug geht so lange zu Wasser, his er bricht" (German proverb--The pitcher goes often to the well, but comes home broken at last). Gentz replied: "It will anyhow last out my time and Metternich's." His standpoint is indicated and judged in these words. In religious matters Gentz was extraordinarily vacillating. At one time he would declare that religion was to him simply a matter of politics; at another, though he never actually went over to Catholicism, he would, in Romantic fashion, make great concessions to it. He prostrated himself at the feet of the Catholic mystic, Adam Müller, who literally took Napoleon to be the devil incarnate (writing, for instance, to Gentz in July 1806, that "as Christians we must subdue the Bonaparte within us"); and, when petitioning the Emperor for an appointment in Austria, he gave as one of his reasons for leaving Prussia, "my long-felt enmity to Protestantism, in the original character and increasingly evil tendencies of which I believe I have discovered, after much and careful proving of the matter, _the root of all the corruption of our times, and one of the main causes of the decay of Europe._"