Even if young Börne had been the fresh, red-cheeked youth he was not, he would hardly have made much impression on his proud, spoiled foster-mother. At first she did not even understand what was the matter with the young man, whose passion--described in his own memoranda was a real school-boy worship, of the kind produced at his age by half-conscious instinct and exaggerated ideas of the perfection of woman. One or two attempts which he made, through the medium of the servant, to procure arsenic from an apothecary's, opened Henriette Herz's eyes to the position, and she did her best, by an admixture of kindness with strictness, to bring him to reason.[10] That she was not quite insensible to his adoration, or quite innocent of a certain amount of coquetry, which masqueraded in this case as motherliness, is shown by the following little incident. Börne had taken her to be between twenty-eight and thirty, but at the dinner-table, on the 3rd of December 1802, she told him that she was thirty-four. In the evening she added two to this figure, but she never acknowledged more than the thirty-six, and on the 5th of March 1803, Börne still supposes this to be her age. So the charming "Frau Mutter," as she allowed him to call her, made herself two years younger than she was. Naturally he continued to love, to admire, to despair, to suffer the pangs of hell because of her indifference, and to feel the bliss of heaven when she smiled at him or said a friendly word; also to be so suspicious, bitter, unreasonable, and capricious that at last it became necessary to send him away.