“Hold your tongue and pack yourself off.”
“Master von Puderlein, you are a man of honor; are you doing me justice for my long years of faithful service? I have always taken your part. When people said ‘von Puderlein is an old miser and a blockhead,’ I have always said, ‘that is not true;’ even if it has been often the truth that people said.”
“Have done, sir, will you?”
“Master von Puderlein, be generous; I humbly entreat you, give me your daughter to wife.”
“I will give you a box on the ear presently, if you do not come to reason.”
“What!” cried Ignatz, starting up in boiling indignation, “a box on the ear, to me—to me, a free spoken member of the society of periwig makers?”
“And if you were a king, and if you were an emperor, with a golden crown on your head, and a sceptre in your hand, here in my own house I am lord and sovereign, and I will give you a box most certainly, if you provoke me much further.”
“Good,” answered Ignatz, haughtily; “very good, Master von Puderlein; we are two, henceforth; this hour I quit this treacherous roof—and you and your periwig stock. But I will be revenged; of that you may be sure; and when the punishment comes upon you and your faithless daughter, and your callow bird of a harpsicord player, then you may think upon Natz Schuppenpelz.”
The journeyman then hastened to pack up his goods, demanded and received his wages, and left the house vowing revenge against its inmates. Von Puderlein was very much incensed; Nanny laughed, and Joseph sat in the garden, troubling himself about nothing but his quartetto, at which he was working.
Wenzel Puderlein saw the hour approaching, when the attention of the Imperial city, and of the world, should be directed to him, as the protector and benefactor of a great musical genius. The dances Joseph had composed for the music seller in the Leopoldstadt, were played again and again in the halls of the nobility; all praised the lightness, the sprightliness and grace that distinguished them; but all enquiries were vain at the music dealer’s, respecting the name of the composer. None knew him; and Joseph himself had no idea what a sensation the pieces he had thrown off so easily, created in the world. But Master Wenzel was well aware of it, and waited with impatience the completion of the first quartetto. At length the manuscript was ready; Puderlein took it, carried it to a music publisher, and had it sent to press immediately, which the sums he had from time to time laid by for Joseph, enabled him to do. Haydn, who was confident his protector would do everything for his advantage, committed all to his hands; he commenced a new quartetto, and the old one was soon nearly forgotten.