Robert had already given her four hundred thalers in bonds. The new terms being rejected, Wieck put everything possible in the way of a speedy termination of the lawsuit. He made it impossible for Clara to get back to Paris, as she wished, to earn more money before the marriage. He demanded that she should postpone her wedding and take a concert tour for three months with him for a consideration of six thousand thalers. Clara declined the arrangement.
One day she sent her maid to the house of her father, and asked him for her winter cloak. He gave this answer to the maid: "Who then is this Mam'selle Wieck? I know two Fräulein Wieck only; they are my two little daughters here. I know no other!" As Litzmann says: "With so shrill a dissonance ended Clara's stay at Leipzig." He compares this exile of the daughter by the father to the story of King Lear and Cordelia. But it was the blind and tyrannical old Lear of the first act, driving from his home his most loving child. On October 3d, Clara went back to Berlin to her mother. Her father moved heaven and earth to make Clara suspect Schumann's fidelity, and he gave the love affair as unpleasant a notoriety as possible. For an instance of senile spite: Clara had always been given a Behrens piano for her concerts in Berlin. Wieck wrote to a friend to go to Behrens, and warn him that he must not lend Clara his pianos, because she was used to the hard English action, and would ruin any others! He wrote that he hoped the honour of the King of Prussia would prevent his disobedient daughter from appearing in public concerts in Berlin. It need hardly be said that Clara was neither forbidden her piano nor her concerts; indeed, the king appeared in person at her concert and applauded the runaway vigorously. By a curious chance at the end of her pièce de résistance, a string broke on the piano; but as a correspondent of Schumann's paper wrote, it came "just at the end, like a cry of victory." After this, Wieck wrote to Behrens protesting against his lending a hand to "a demoralised girl without shame." Clara learned that such of her letters as had gone through the Wieck home were opened, and she received an anonymous letter which she knew must have been dictated by her father. Her suspicions were later proved. The worst of the affair was the diabolical malice that led Wieck to have the letter put into her hand just before her chief Berlin concert.
Next, he announced that his reason for not granting his consent was that Schumann was a drunkard. Robert found witnesses enough to be sponsors for his high respectability, but the accusation was a staggering blow in the midst of the deep melancholia into which the endless struggle and the recent death of Henrietta Voigt had plunged him. Clara had the rare agony of seeing him weep. It was now the turn of the strong Clara to break down, and only with the doctor's aid she continued her concerts. Her father's effort to undermine her good name extended to the publication of a lithographed account of his side of the story. But while certain old friends snubbed her, the lies that were told against her met their truest answer in the integrity of her whole career, and in the purity and honour of her life. This her own father was the first and the last ever to slander.
It is noteworthy, in view of the lightness of so many of the love affairs of the musicians, such as the case of Liszt, who twice eloped with married women and discussed the formality of divorce afterward, that through the long and ardent and greatly tormented love story of the Schumanns there never appears a line in any of their multitudinous letters which shows or hints the faintest dream of any procedure but the most upright. Always they encouraged each other with ringing beautiful changes on the one theme of their lives: Be true to me as I am true to you. Despair not.
The lawsuit dragged on and on. Wieck exhausted all the devices of postponement in which the law is so fertile. Schumann found himself the victim of a pamphlet of direct assault and downright libel, but all these things were only obstacles to exercise fidelity. The lovers felt that no power on earth could cut them apart. They began to dream of their marriage as more certain than the dawn. Schumann writes to Clara—"Mein Herzensbrautmädchen"—that he wishes her to study and prepare for his exclusive hearing a whole concert of music, the bride's concert. She responds that he too must prepare for her music of his own, for a bridegroom's concert. He writes and begs her to compose some music and dedicate it to him; he implores her not to ignore her genius. She writes that she cannot find inspiration; that he is the family's genius for original work. Always they mingled music with love.
The composer Hiller gave a notable dinner to Liszt, who, after toasting Mendelssohn, toasted Schumann, "and spoke of me in such beautiful French and such tender words, that I turned blood-red." January 31, 1840, Schumann had taken up his plan to gain himself a doctor's degree to match Clara's titles. He had asked a friend to appeal to the University of Jena to give him an honorary degree, or set him an examination to pass; for his qualifications he mentioned modestly:
"My sphere of action as editor on a high-class paper, which has now existed for seven years; my position as composer and the fact of my having really worked hard, both as editor and musician."
He began an essay on Shakespeare's relation to music, but without waiting for this the University of Jena granted him his doctorate on February 24, 1840, a bit of speed which must have been marvellously refreshing to this poor victim of so much delay.
The very day the degree was granted, he had decided to take legal steps for libel against the attack of Wieck's, which had been printed in pamphlet form and distributed. Toward Wieck he is still pitiful, "The wretched man is torturing himself; let it be his punishment." The libel suit was not prosecuted and his anger vanished in the rapture of being made a doctor of philosophy in flattering terms. As he confesses:
"Of course the first I did was to send a copy to the north for my betrothed; who is exactly like a child and will dance at being engaged to a doctor."