MUNICH***


Transcribed from the 1864 Chapman and Hall “Tales of All Countries”
edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org





                 THE HOUSE OF HEINE BROTHERS, IN MUNICH.


THE house of Heine Brothers, in Munich, was of good repute at the time of
which I am about to tell,—a time not long ago; and is so still, I trust.
It was of good repute in its own way, seeing that no man doubted the word
or solvency of Heine Brothers; but they did not possess, as bankers, what
would in England be considered a large or profitable business.  The
operations of English bankers are bewildering in their magnitude.
Legions of clerks are employed.  The senior book-keepers, though only
salaried servants, are themselves great men; while the real partners are
inscrutable, mysterious, opulent beyond measure, and altogether unknown
to their customers.  Take any firm at random,—Brown, Jones, and Cox, let
us say,—the probability is that Jones has been dead these fifty years,
that Brown is a Cabinet Minister, and that Cox is master of a pack of
hounds in Leicestershire.  But it was by no means so with the house of
Heine Brothers, of Munich.  There they were, the two elderly men, daily
to be seen at their dingy office in the Schrannen Platz; and if any
business was to be transacted requiring the interchange of more than a
word or two, it was the younger brother with whom the customer was, as a
matter of course, brought into contact.  There were three clerks in the
establishment; an old man, namely, who sat with the elder brother and had
no personal dealings with the public; a young Englishman, of whom we
shall anon hear more; and a boy who ran messages, put the wood on to the
stoves, and swept out the bank.  Truly he house of Heine Brothers was of
no great importance; but nevertheless it was of good repute.

The office, I have said, was in the Schrannen Platz, or old Market-place.
Munich, as every one knows, is chiefly to be noted as a new town,—so new
that many of the streets and most of the palaces look as though they had
been sent home last night from the builders, and had only just been taken
out of their bandboxes It is angular, methodical, unfinished, and
palatial.  But there is an old town; and, though the old town be not of
surpassing interest, it is as dingy, crooked, intricate, and dark as
other old towns in Germany.  Here, in the old Market-place, up one long
broad staircase, were situated the two rooms in which was held the bank
of Heine Brothers.

Of the elder member of the firm we shall have something to say before
this story be completed.  He was an old bachelor, and was possessed of a
bachelor’s dwelling somewhere out in the suburbs of the city.  The junior
brother was a married man, with a wife some twenty years younger than
himself, with two daughters, the elder of whom was now one-and-twenty,
and one son.  His name was Ernest Heine, whereas the senior brother was
known as Uncle Hatto.  Ernest Heine and his wife inhabited a portion of
one of those new palatial residences at the further end of the Ludwigs
Strasse; but not because they thus lived must it be considered that they
were palatial people.  By no means let it be so thought, as such an idea
would altogether militate against whatever truth of character painting
there may be in this tale.  They were not palatial people, but the very
reverse, living in homely guise, pursuing homely duties, and satisfied
with homely pleasures.  Up two pairs of stairs, however, in that street
of palaces, they lived, having there a commodious suite of large rooms,
furnished, after the manner of the Germans, somewhat gaudily as regarded
their best salon, and with somewhat meagre comfort as regarded their
other rooms.  But, whether in respect of that which was meagre, or
whether in respect of that which was gaudy, they were as well off as
their neighbours; and this, as I take it, is the point of excellence
which is desirable.

Ernest Heine was at this time over sixty; his wife was past forty; and
his eldest daughter, as I have said, was twenty-one years of age.  His
second child, also a girl, was six years younger; and their third child,
a boy, had not been born till another similar interval had elapsed.  He
was named Hatto after his uncle, and the two girls had been christened
Isa and Agnes.  Such, in number and mode of life, was the family of the
Heines.

We English folk are apt to imagine that we are nearer akin to Germans
than to our other continental neighbours.  This may be so in blood, but,
nevertheless, the difference in manners is so striking, that it could
hardly be enhanced.  An Englishman moving himself off to a city in the
middle of Central America will find the customs to which he must adapt
himself less strange to him there, than he would in many a German town.
But in no degree of life is the difference more remarkable than among
unmarried but marriageable young women.  It is not my purpose at the
present moment to attribute a superiority in this matter to either
nationality.  Each has its own charm, its own excellence, its own
Heaven-given grace, whereby men are led up to purer thoughts and sweet
desires; and each may possibly have its own defect.  I will not here
describe the excellence or defect of either; but will, if it be in my
power, say a word as to this difference.  The German girl of
one-and-twenty,—our Isa’s age,—is more sedate, more womanly, more
meditative than her English sister.  The world’s work is more in her
thoughts, and the world’s amusements less so.  She probably knows less of
those things which women learn than the English girl, but that which she
does know is nearer to her hand for use.  She is not so much accustomed
to society, but nevertheless she is more mistress of her own manner.  She
is not taught to think so much of those things which flurry and disturb
the mind, and therefore she is seldom flurried and disturbed.  To both of
them, love,—the idea of love,—must be the thought of all the most
absorbing; for is it not fated for them that the joys and sorrows of
their future life must depend upon it?  But the idea of the German girl
is the more realistic, and the less romantic.  Poetry and fiction she may
have read, though of the latter sparingly; but they will not have imbued
her with that hope for some transcendental paradise of affection which so
often fills and exalts the hearts of our daughters here at home.  She is
moderate in her aspirations, requiring less excitement than an English
girl; and never forgetting the solid necessities of life,—as they are so
often forgotten here in England.  In associating with young men, an
English girl will always remember that in each one she so meets she may
find an admirer whom she may possibly love, or an admirer whom she may
probably be called on to repel.  She is ever conscious of the fact of
this position; and a romance is thus engendered which, if it may at times
be dangerous, is at any rate always charming.  But the German girl, in
her simplicity, has no such consciousness.  As you and I, my reader,
might probably become dear friends were we to meet and know each other,
so may the German girl learn to love the fair-haired youth with whom
chance has for a time associated her; but to her mind there occurs no
suggestive reason why it should be so,—no probability that the youth may
regard her in such light, because that chance has come to pass.  She can
therefore give him her hand without trepidation, and talk with him for
half an hour, when called on to do so, as calmly as she might do with his
sister.

Such a one was Isa Heine at the time of which I am writing.  We English,
in our passion for daily excitement, might call her phlegmatic, but we
should call her so unjustly.  Life to her was a serious matter, of which
the daily duties and daily wants were sufficient to occupy her thoughts.
She was her mother’s companion, the instructress of both her brother and
her sister, and the charm of her father’s vacant hours.  With such calls
upon her time, and so many realities around her, her imagination did not
teach her to look for joys beyond those of her present life and home.
When love and marriage should come to her, as come they probably might,
she would endeavour to attune herself to a new happiness and a new sphere
of duties.  In the meantime she was contented to keep her mother’s
accounts, and look after her brother and sister up two pair of stairs in
the Ludwigs Strasse.  But change would certainly come, we may prophesy;
for Isa Heine was a beautiful girl, tall and graceful, comely to the eye,
and fit in every way to be loved and cherished as the partner of a man’s
home.

I have said that an English clerk made a part of that small establishment
in the dingy banking-office in the Schrannen Platz, and I must say a word
or two of Herbert Onslow.  In his early career he had not been fortunate.
His father, with means sufficiently moderate, and with a family more than
sufficiently large, had sent him to a public school at which he had