and then we shall never cease
loving each other?" Had he not thence broken into French?

"Je vous baise vos mains,--votre visage--afin, tout ce que vous me
permettez de baiser. Je suis de tout mon coeur," etc.

His sister later had a target painted for a club of Salzburg friends who
met for crossbow practice, and the target represented "the melancholy
farewell of two persons dissolved in tears, Wolfgang and the Baesle."

His flirtations with his cousin seemed to have angered his father, who
was eager for him to go to France and conquer Paris. The father was the
more indignant as Mozart was at the same time becoming entangled with
Aloysia Weber--of whom more later. Mozart loved his father and treated
him with the utmost respect, but he could rise to a sense of his own
dignity when the occasion demanded, and he wrote him:

"The bitter way in which you write about my merry and innocent
intercourse with your brother's daughter, makes me justly indignant; but
it is not as you think. I require to give you no answer on the subject."

A few days later he writes to his cousin with all the old hilarity, his
letter being mostly in doggerel rhyme beginning:

"You may think or believe that I have croaked (_crepirt_)
or kicked the bucket (_verreckt_). But I beg you not to think
so, for how could I write so beautifully if I were dead?"

Nearly a year later he writes to her regretting that he could not have
her visit him at Kaisersheim, and begging her to meet him in Munich.

In Munich it was Mozart's fate to find a tragedy awaiting him, for
Aloysia (whom he had loved as solemnly as he had loved his cousin
frivolously, and to whom he looked forward longingly after his long
absence) showed herself indifferent. He had planned that his cousin
should "have a great part to play in this meeting with Aloysia." This I
would rather interpret as evidence that Mozart was quite ignorant of any
deep affection in his cousin. There is nothing in his life that shows
him as anything other than the most tender-hearted of men, and it is
inconceivable that he should have brought his cousin to Munich simply to
drag her at the chariot of his triumph with Aloysia.

And yet his flirtation with the Baesle certainly went past mere bantering
and repartee. She stayed several weeks in Munich and must have furnished
Mozart grateful diversion from his humiliation. She went with him to
Salzburg and later, when she returned to her own home, we find him
writi