of excellent family, and of a type that, as we find, suggested to Platen the vanished Count Mercy d'Argenteau. Platen writes: "Prom this accident developed a long love, which defied all separation, to every impression of which I surrendered myself, and which filled my heart with a cloud of dreams. The officer mentioned was that 'Federigo', who in my later pages often is so named."
"A cloud of dreams", indeed! For we find that Platen never exchanged more than a few utterly insignificant words with Captain "Federigo" von Brandenstein. He never was on terms of writing or of other real acquaintance with Branden stein; was part of the time—most of it—unknown to Brandenstein even as a street-acquaintance or fellow-officer. But Platen thus nourished, wholly by a process of idealism, what really did become a life-long love; such even amid many other realities of like sexualism. Once again Platen had met his fatal "type," in outward shape at least; and he gave himself up to an obsessive longing for it, like a woman. In reviewing this Brandenstein affair, awhile later, Platen mentions that the various occasions when he saw Brandenstein, as on the street or at parade or in a café, "served to strengthen my madness, and to establish a perfect passion in me—mild in its general characteristics [?] though often amounting to a heated longing." But he insists that in all this incoherent emotion he had not at this time "any idea that a punishable [i. e. physical] relation between two men could exist; otherwise I would probably have been frightened back from it. Some time later, I found man-to-man love outlined in several literary works, and referred to these my awakening to a notice of the topic"—and to his Plutarch readings. "But at this same date, I was still ignorant that sensual-sexual passion could come into play here—that unblessed secret was first clear to me by reading some indecent verses by Piron … Never did lust desecrate my feeling for Federigo."
— 580 —
(18)
