TRANSLATED BY FLORENCE LEONARD
In the fall of the year 1787 Mozart and his wife undertook a journey to
Prague, where he was to finish and bring out his masterpiece, Don
Juan.
Eleven o'clock of the fourteenth of September found them well on their way and in the best of spirits. They had been traveling two days, and were about one hundred and twenty miles from Vienna, among the beautiful Mährische mountains. The splendid coach, drawn by three post-horses, belonged to an elderly Frau Volkstett, wife of General Volkstett, who prided herself on her intimacy with the Mozarts and on the favors she had shown them. The carriage was painted a bright yellowish-red, the body adorned with garlands of gay-colored flowers, the wheels finished with narrow stripes of gold. The high top was fitted with stiff leather curtains, now drawn back and fastened.
The dress of the travelers was simple, for the new clothes to be worn at court were carefully packed in the trunk. Mozart wore an embroidered waistcoat of a somewhat faded blue, his ordinary brown coat—with a row of large, curiously fashioned gilt buttons—black silk stockings and small-clothes, and shoes with gilt buckles. As the day grew warm, unusually warm for September, he had taken off both hat and coat and was sitting in his shirt-sleeves, bare headed, serenely chatting. His thick hair, drawn back into a braid, was powdered even more carelessly than usual.
Frau Mozart's hair, a wealth of light brown curls, never disfigured by powder, fell, half unfastened, upon her shoulders. She wore a traveling-suit of striped stuff—light green and white.
They were slowly ascending a gentle slope, where rich fields alternated with long stretches of woodland, when Mozart exclaimed: "How many woods we have passed every day of our journey, and I hardly noticed them, much less thought of going into them! Postilion, stop and let your horses rest a bit, while we get some of those blue-bells yonder in the shade!"
As they rose to leave the coach they became aware of a slight accident for which the master had to take the blame. Through his carelessness a bottle of choice perfume had lost its cork, and its contents had run, unperceived, over clothing and carriage cushions. "I might have known it," lamented Frau Mozart, "I have smelled it this long while! Oh dear! A whole bottle of real 'Rosée d'Aurore!' I was as careful of it as if it had been gold!"
"Never mind, little goose," was Mozart's comforting answer. "This was the only way that your sacred smelling-stuff would do us any good. The air was like an oven here, and all your fanning made it no cooler. But presently the carriage was comfortable—you said it was because I poured a couple of drops on my jabot—and we could talk and enjoy our journey instead of hanging our heads like sheep in a butcher's cart. It will last all the rest of the way. Come now, let us stick our two Vienna noses into this green wilderness!"
They climbed the bank arm-in-arm, and strolled into the shade of the pines, which grew deeper and deeper, till only here and there a stray sunbeam lighted up the green mossy carpet. So cool was the air that Mozart soon had to put on the coat, which, but for his prudent wife, he would have left behind.
Presently he stopped and looked up through the rows of lofty tree-trunks. "How beautiful!" he cried. "It is like being in church! This is a real wood, a whole family of trees! No human hand planted them, but they seem to have come and stood there just because it is pleasant to live and grow in company. To think that I have traveled half over Europe, have seen the Alps and the ocean, and yet, happening to come into an ordinary Bohemian pine-woods, I am astonished that such a thing actually exists; not as a poetic fiction like the nymphs and fauns, but really living, drawn out of the earth by moisture and sunshine! Imagine the deer, with his wonderful antlers, at home here, and the mischievous squirrel, the wood-cock, and the jay!" He stooped and picked a mushroom, praised its deep red color and delicate white lines, and put a handful of cones into his pocket.