as left a
widow at twenty-eight with two children, my sister and myself, was
heart-broken. The few years of her married life had been most bright
and brilliant. My father was a rising poet, and such was his
popularity that he was able to indulge his tastes as he liked, whether
in travelling or in making his house a pleasant centre of social life.
Contemporaries and friends of my father, particularly Baron Simolin, a
very intimate friend, who spent the Christmas of 1825 in our house,
have written of the bright gaiety, the whole-hearted enjoyment of life
that reigned there, and have told how, though his income was to say
the least of it small, Wilhelm Mueller's home was the rallying-point
for all the cultivated, scientific, and artistic society of Dessau,
who felt attracted by the simple and unaffected yet truly genial
disposition of the master of the house.

It would be interesting to know how much an author could make at that
time by his pen. Publishers seem to have been far more liberal then
than they are now. The circumstances were different. The number of
writers was of course much smaller, and the sale of really popular
books probably much larger. Anyhow, my father, whose salary was
minute, seems to have been able to enjoy the few years of his married
life in great comfort. The thought of saving money, however, seems
never to have entered his poetical mind, and after his unexpected
death, due to paralysis of the heart, it was found that hardly any
provision had been made for his family. Even the life insurance, which
is obligatory on every civil servant, and the pension granted by the
Duke, gave my mother but a very small income, fabulously small, when
one considers that she had to bring up two children on it. It has been
a riddle to me ever since how she was able to do it.

However, it was done, and could only have been done in a small town
like Dessau, where education was as good as it was cheap, and where
very little was expected by society. We must also take into account
the very low prices which then ruled at Dessau with regard to almost
all the necessaries of life. I see from the old newspapers that beef
sold at about threepence a pound (two groschen), mutton at about
twopence. Wine was sold at seven to eight groschen a bottle, a better
sort for twelve to fourteen groschen--a groschen being about a penny.
People drank mostly beer, and this was sold under Government
inspection at two to three groschen per qua