[6] Despite the liberal open atmosphere of the parental home, where various prominent Berliners were regular visitors, and despite plenty of animated conversations with friends, the diaries she kept as an adolescent indicate that she felt acutely constrained by the dull and conventional "bourgeois" life which she led: Mornings nothing, afternoons nothing and evenings not a lot ... Saturday some hours with Valentini [her Italian teacher], dull lesson about a [long since forgotten] play ...

A phrase reproduced in several sources indicates that she "often violated the conventions of her time: she rode like the devil, shot with pistol, on holiday in 1841 swam in the sea off Helgoland, smoked, and took an interest in gymnastics".

[5] Even before she met Georg Herwegh she was enthusiastic about another revolution: I read about French revolutionary history and was seized by a volcanic passion, at once burning, at once half frozen.

[10]The death of the king in June 1840 brought the prospect of a new generation of monarch, and many of those who back in 1832 had celebrated visions of liberalism and democracy at Hambach dared to think their moment had arrived.

Around this time Sczaniecka gave Siegmund a ring inscribed, "Poland is still not lost" ("Noch ist Polen nicht verloren").

Her diaries, gleefully quoted by a biographer, indicate that the men in her social circle were "time servers, liberal activists and groupies, low life, philistines, pretty boys, weathercocks, donkeys, dropouts, no-hopers and sycophants" ("Beamtenseelen, Menschenware, niederträchtige Gesellschaft, Schufte, Philister, liberales Pack, Schöngeister, Windbeutel, Esel, entmarkte Gesellen, Höflinge, Speichellecker.").

[9] She had a powerful crush on the young diplomat, Jean-Jacques Jules Piaget, who married her younger sister, Fanny, and she was devastated when he died suddenly in 1840.

Der Mann wie das Weib sollen nur einen Oberherrn anerkennen, vor dem sie sich in den Staub werfen - Gott.

The man, like the woman, should acknowledge just one overlord, before whom they cast themselves into the dust: God.On 28 October 1841, Emma Siegmund got her hands on a copy of "Gedichte eines Lebendigen" (loosely "Poems of one who is alive"), a poetry collection by the young Stuttgart poet Georg Herwegh, who was living in political exile in Switzerland.

He was looking for people to work on a new project to be centred round a newspaper, "Deutschen Boten aus ser Schweiz" ("German messages from Switzerland"), intended, it has been suggested, to get around the press censorship in Prussia.

Nevertheless, helped by her friend Charlotte Guticke (who herself later married Max Duncker), Siegmund managed, at an art exhibition, to get close enough to Herwegh to speak with him.

In December 1842, the king became aware that Herwegh had published an open letter complaining about the political situation in Germany, and ordered that the literary trouble maker be expelled from the kingdom.

However, they were also awaited by a Saxon police officer who served Herwegh with an expulsion order without even permitting him to leave the main railway station.

She reacted to Follen's information on her fiancé by immediately setting off for Zürich, where she arrived by stage coach, accompanied by her (already a widow for more than five years) elder sister, Minna Caspari, and by her father, on 23 February 1843.

[5] By the time they died, the investment would probably have appeared worthwhile, but in September 1843 the couple moved to Paris, the city identified in sources as "the waiting room for the [next] revolution",[9][12] where their first child, Horace, was born three days short of 1844, and where, between 1843 and 1848, Emma became, among other things, a "salonnière" - the hostess of a politically engaged "salon".

A second volume of "Gedichte eines Lebendigen" (loosely "Poems of one who is alive"), published in 1843 had sharpened up his revolutionary credentials with his target readership.

[5] (The czar's mother had been born a princess of Württemberg, less than a day's march from Karlsruhe, the avowed destination of the armed revolutionary group which Georg Herwegh had assembled.

While the force waited in Strasbourg Emma Herwegh, disguised as a stylishly attired teenage boy and armed with two daggers,[15] successfully made contact with Friedrich Hecker in Baden to find only a lukewarm welcome for the support offered.

Despite a reward of 4,000 Gulden being offered for Georg's capture, he and Emma escaped with their lives and, disguised as peasants,[15] fled across the river into Switzerland, heading initially to Geneva.

[16] Georg Herwegh, whose extremism had been exaggerated in government propaganda, and who never captured the support of the moderate majority among the reformers in the region, found himself widely ridiculed while Emma was disinherited by her father whose business interests in Berlin had, since 1842, been badly affected by his daughter's very public displays of revolutionary passion.

However, Herwegh had not taken the precaution of telling his friend that half a year earlier he had embarked on an intense love affair with Natalia, Herzen's wife.

The love affair with Natalia broke Georg's friendship with Herzen who threatened to challenge Hervegh to a duel, before relocating to London.

[19] Some sources imply a romantic attachment between Orsini and Emma Herwegh, but the matter is one in respect of which it becomes impossible to disentangle the factual from the fanciful.

[12] When that failed, in March 1856, she conspired with others to smuggle hacksaw blades (hidden in a book) and bed sheets into a Mantua prison cell where Orsini was being held, enabling him to escape custody and the threat of possible execution.

Her family resumed financial support, and she also earned money by undertaking translations of works by French, Polish or Italian authors into German.

[4] Around the same time the couple's financial situation took a turn for the worse: Emma's inheritance seems finally to have been exhausted, and one reason given for leaving Zürich was the need to get away from people to whom they owed money.