As to the relationship with Bettina, their correspondence shows it to have been warmly emotional as well as intellectual. Bettina wrote at length to Madame Goethe of Günderode’s extreme sensitiveness and intensity, describing the latter’s pallor the first time that Bettina kissed her on the mouth, and generally betraying awareness of unpleasant gossip and eagerness to deflect it from herself.[5] The facts of the case seem to be that, like Labé and Clémence de Bourges, the two girls had a serious quarrel, and Günderode’s suicide followed closely enough upon it to create some unpleasantness for the survivor. Here, too, the cause of the quarrel was a man, and editors of Günderode’s poems and letters claim that it was the tragic end of this romance with him which led the poet to take her own life. The man involved had, while fairly young, married a widow thirteen years his senior, who had several children. When he and Günderode found themselves deeply in love, the wife, with “sterbender Güte,” agreed to release him, but under emotional stress the already tubercular young man suffered a serious hemorrhage, and since he was not yet free it was the wife who nursed him back to health. In penitent gratitude he swore that if he lived he would never leave her, and he kept his vow. This version of Günderode’s tragedy is offered by the conventional biographies.[6] In Bettina’s letters and elsewhere, however, the story survives of the man’s being a fellow guest of hers at one of the house parties which spacious living and difficult travel fostered in the eighteenth century. Full of his love for Günderode, he paid much attention to a child in the house who reminded him of his beloved, and in Bettina’s presence he called the little girl “his Karoline” (her name was Sophie) and caressed and kissed her. The fiery Bettina, furious that he ‘used expressions in speaking of Günderode as if he had a right to her love,’ told him off roundly, and this contretemps apparently led to some difficulty between him and Günderode—the only reasonable explanation being that Bettina must also have talked as if _she_ “had a right to her love.”