Excerpt from Heinrich Heine's Memoirs, Vol. 2 of 2: From His Works, Letters, and Conversations I want not only to make clear the aims, tendencies and its most secret purpose, but also the genesis of the book, so that the reader can find out for himself how much belief and confidence my statements deserve. I did not write in the manner of Madame de Sta'el, and if I have tried to be as little tiresome as possible, I have waived every effort of style and phrase which is found so highly developed in Madame de Sta'el, the greatest author of France during the Empire. Yes, in my opinion the author of Corinna overtops all her contemporaries, and I cannot admire enough the coruscating fireworks of her style, but her fireworks unfortunately leave an evil smelling dankness and we must confess that her genius is not so sexless as it used to be said that the genius of Madame de Sta'el was: her genius is a woman, with all the faults and caprices of a woman and it was my duty as a man to counteract the brilliant cancan of her genius. It was the more necessary as the statements of the book De l'allemagne referred to circumstances of which the French knew nothing and which therefore possessed the charm of novelty; for example, everything which she wrote concerning German philosophy and the romantic school. I believe that I have given most honest information concerning German philosophy in my book, and time has confirmed what was, when I wrote, unheard of and incredible. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.