Her sympathies lay with the oppressed population, which meant uncompromising rejection of the Prussian and Russian positions. 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. - But how might it be if the time came when every man thought like a king, when everyone was taught such a level of empowerment that people saw one another only as brothers, where only merit mattered, where divine spirit was revealed in every human heart, to the point where kings were no longer needed? 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. Emma Siegmund did not share their optimism. The new king was crowned on 18 October 1840. She did not need to walk far from the family home to witness the festivities. Her diary comment comprised three words: "Everywhere boring" ("Langeweile über alles"). By this time she was frequently escaping from the middle-class stuffiness of the family home in Berlin by visiting her friend Emilia Sczaniecka whose family estate at Pakosław near Posen became like a second home to her. The two were in several ways - notably politically - kindred spirits, and spent long hours together discussing independence and freedom (for Poland). Around this time Sczaniecka gave Siegmund a ring inscribed, "Poland is still not lost" ("Noch ist Polen nicht verloren"). Emma would wear that ring for the rest of her long life. Georg Herwegh By the time she was 25, both Emma's sisters were or had been married. She was not. That she came from a cultured, socially well connected, and unusually wealthy family was widely recognised in the city. 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."). 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. On 28 October 1841, Emma Siegmund got