during parade—but I see only too clearly that I am nothing to him" … Only one means is left to guide me out of this misery—Death. Death—that means a suicide" …
It is superfluous to point here the evidence that what tormented Platen so fiercely was not merely the negatively "intellectual" relations with Hornstein, but the stress of sexual desire. He must have been deeply the victim of honest self-deceptions when he tried, later or at the time, to believe that no corporeal thrill, no concrete physical yearnings coloured his sentiments for Brandenstein and Hornstein. He was a robust young man; the physical passion constantly must have sought its outlet under the seethe of this sort of similisexual fire. It was not mere torturing "idealism". The outcry "I am lost!" may well point out his terror at finding that his abnormal passion was a physical one, as well as a psychic condition; a tendency never to be "cured."
Fortunately the unconscious Captain Wilhelm von Hornstein was not to trouble Platen's heart, nor to beget thoughts of suicide, or anything else for long time. Already Schnitzlein had warned Platen that if he, Platen, once came to know Hornstein—even a little—all his queer illusions about that blunt, commonplace officer would vanish; that he would find Hornstein a dull, uninteresting, rather rude type of man; no matter how handsome. Now, Platen had worried about just this possibility, more and more. He suffered; but he dreaded a broken idol. Once (March 19, 1816) Schnitzlein had even assured Platen that Hornstein was "not capable of a true friendship." Platen found this outlook "terrifying, frightful, deeply depressing." But so came the affair to an end! For, one night, Platen had to divide the watch with Hornstein; a chance he had longed for. So came their first real conversation, and his first clear impression of his Adonis. Platen found Hornstein ill-bred, vulgar, commonplace. There was no ground
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