Mozart and Madame de Pompadour. From painting by V. de Paredes.
Little Wolfgang had played before Maria Theresa; now he performed before her ally, Madame de Pompadour, then within a few months of her end, for the all-powerful favourite of Louis XV. died in the following April. Leopold Mozart, writing home to Salzburg, speaks thus of the Pompadour; "She must have been very beautiful, for she is still comely. She is tall and stately; stout, but well proportioned, with some likeness to her Imperial Majesty about the eyes. She is proud, and has a remarkable mind." Mozart's sister remembered in after days how she placed little Wolfgang on the table before her, but pushed him aside when he bent forward to kiss her, on which he indignantly asked: "Who is this that does not want to kiss me? The empress kissed me." The king's daughters were much more friendly, and, contrary to all etiquette, kissed and played with the children, both in their own apartments and in the public corridors.
As before at Vienna and afterward in London, the little Mozarts made a great hit in Paris, and performed before the most distinguished audiences. Grimm relates in his correspondence "a truly astonishing instance of the boy's genius." Wolfgang accompanied a lady in an Italian air without seeing the music, supplying the harmony for the passage which was to follow from that which he had just heard. This could not be done without some mistakes, but when the song was ended he begged the lady to sing it again, played the accompaniment and the melody itself with perfect correctness, and repeated it ten times, altering the character of the accompaniment for each. On a melody being dictated to him, he supplied the bass and the parts without using the clavier at all; he showed himself in all ways so accomplished that his father was convinced he would obtain service at court on his return home. Leopold Mozart now thought the time was come for introducing the boy as a composer, and he printed four sonatas for the piano and violin, rejoicing at the idea of the noise which they would make in the world, appearing with the announcement on the title-page that they were the work of a child of seven years old. He thought well of these sonatas, independently of their childish authorship; one andante especially "shows remarkable taste." When it happened that, in the last trio of Opus 2, a mistake of the young master, which his father had corrected (consisting of three consecutive fifths for the violin), was printed, he consoled himself by reflecting that "they can serve as a proof that Wolfgangerlf wrote the sonatas himself, which, naturally, not everyone would believe."
