The only readable part of _Madonna_ nowadays is the heroine's narrative of her life experiences. The author meets her in a little Bohemian village; when he first sees her, walking in a Roman Catholic procession, he is tremendously impressed by her extraordinary beauty. Later in the same day he accidently makes his way into her father's cottage, wins the narrow-minded, bigoted old man's heart (in a very improbable manner) by the unction with which he tells him the story of Casanova, who had at one time lived in that neighbourhood in the castle of Dux, receives an invitation to supper, and spends part of the night in a sentimental conversation with the daughter, whom he discovers to be a woman deserving, in his estimation, the name of saint--a secular or worldly saint (_eine Weltheilige_)--and who, in that capacity, embraces and kisses him, weeping hot tears. He is obliged to leave the neighbourhood next morning, but soon afterwards receives from her an immoderately lengthy letter--_Die Bekenntnisse einer weltlichen Seele_ ("The Confessions of a Worldly Soul")--in which she makes a frank revelation of herself and all her experiences. This beautiful girl is an unfortunate victim. She has been enticed by a relative, a depraved woman, to leave Teplitz, her native town, where she lived in poverty with her parents, and come to Dresden. There, under the pretext of providing for her future, this woman educated her for a rich debauchee, a man of high position, whose prey she was to become as soon as she was grown up. The time comes; all preparations are made; at night she is locked into a room with her benefactor and pursuer, whom she loathes. She forcibly breaks away from him, manages to get out, and, in her despair, seeing a light in the room of a young theological student who lives in the same house, takes refuge with him. She has long loved this young man and he her. Now with chaste passion she gives herself to him, and he cannot find it in his heart to repulse her. But on the following day, repenting as a Christian of his sin, he commits suicide. The young girl has to make her way on foot from Dresden to her native village in Bohemia, where, after her experience of the life and variety of a great town, she pines in sadness and loneliness. Her old father, with whom she lives, is a cripple and a fanatically bigoted Roman Catholic.