“When the Pope marries Kate——”
“Hush, you clown! I say a year from to-day there must be no such person as an Imperial composer named Wolf Mozart to be found within the walls of Vienna.”
“Thank you kindly for that!”
“I hear our old friends talking about us and our fortunes.”
“Give us an example.”
“Well, say one morning, shortly after nine, our exubriant old neighbour, Frau Volkstett, strutting straight across the cabbage market. She had been absent for three months; her great journey to visit her brother-in-law—her constant theme since we knew her—had at last become a reality; and now she has come back, and her full heart—bubbling over with the joy of travel and the impatience of friendship, and all sorts of delightful news—draws her irresistibly to the Frau Oberst. Upstairs she goes, taps at the door, and, without waiting to be bidden, walks in; you can imagine the delight and the embracements from both sides! ‘Now, dearest, best Frau Oberst,’ she begins, after some preliminaries, taking a fresh breath, ‘I bring you a bagful of messages! Can you guess from whom?’ ‘What? is it possible—did you pass through Berlin? Did you see the Mozarts? Ah, dear, sweet friend, relieve my impatience! How are our good friends? Do they like it as well as they did at first?’ ‘Yes, indeed! This summer the king sent him to Karlsbad. When would his beloved majesty, Emperor Joseph, have thought of doing such a thing? They had both but just come back when I was there. He is beaming with health and life, is growing stout and roundish, and is as lively as Mercury.’”
And now the little woman proceeded to elaborate everything in her assumed rôle in the most glowing colours. Of their home Unter den Linden, of their garden and country-house, of the brilliant effectiveness of his appearance in public, and of the exclusive little gatherings at court, where he accompanied the queen’s song on the piano, her description taking life as she went on. Entire conversations, the most charming anecdotes, she seemed to shake out of her sleeve. At the same time she was roguish enough to supply the person of our hero with a number of brand-new homely virtues, which had sprouted out of the solid ground of Prussian existence, and among which the said Frau Volkstett had noted as the highest phenomenon and proof of the marvellous potence of new surroundings the wee beginnings of a most praiseworthy little trait of parsimony, which proved a most graceful acquisition. “Yes, and only think, he has three thousand thalers secure, and all that for what? For leading a concert once a week and the opera twice. Ah, I saw him, our dear, little precious Mozart, in the midst of his kapelle. I sat with his wife in her box right across from their majesties. And what did the handbill say? Here it is; I brought it for you,—I wrapped it about a little present I brought you from myself and the Mozarts; here it is in plain letters!
“Heaven help us! Tarar! Ah, dear friend! To think that I should live to see it! Two years ago, when Mozart was writing his Don Juan, and that confounded villainous Salieri was also making preparations to repeat the triumph his piece brought him in Paris upon his own territory, and when he and his boon-companions thought they had plucked the Don Juan as they had Figaro, leaving it neither dead nor alive to put it upon the stage,—don’t you remember, I then and there took a vow not to go and see the infamous piece, and I kept my word. When everybody rushed to the show—you too, dear Frau Oberst—I sat down quietly by my stove and took my cat upon my lap to spend the evening. But now, think of it! Tarar on the Berlin stage, the work of his bitterest enemy, directed by Mozart! ‘You must come,’ he said to me, ‘though it were only to tell them in Vienna that I do not hurt a hair of his head. I wish he were here himself, the envious knave, to see that there is no need for me to murder another fellow’s thing to remain what I am!’”
“Brava! bravissima!” exclaimed Mozart with roaring delight. He took his little wife by the ears, kissing and tickling her, until this bright soap-bubble game of a dreamy future—which, alas! never approximated this happy culmination—ended in mirth and boisterous laughter.
Meanwhile they had reached the valley, and were approaching a village which they had noticed from the hill-top, and behind which a pleasant country-house in modern style, the residence of the Count von Schinzberg, became visible. It was their intention to rest and dine in the place. The inn where they stopped was quite at the end of the village, and close beside it a by-road planted with a row of poplars led to the garden of the Count.