cloth for me
to-day--but how? Good heavens! I told her repeatedly, 'This is the way
my wife does it,' but it was all in vain. I rejoice to hear that you
have so good an appetite;... You must walk a great deal, but I don't
like you taking such long walks without me. Pray do all I tell you, for
it comes from my heart. Adieu, my darling, my only love! I send you
2,999 and 1/2 kisses flying about in the air till you catch them. Nun
sag ich dir etwas ins Ohr--du nun mir--nun machen wir dass Maul auf und
zu immer mehr--und mehr--endlich sagen wir;--es ist wagen
Slampi--Strampi, du kannst dir nun dabei denken was du willst das ist
ebben die Comoditaet. Adieu, 1,000 tender kisses. Ever your Mozart."

It is evident that during her stay in Baden some person attempted
familiarity with Constanze and was rewarded with a box on the ears.
Mozart wrote playfully to her advising her to be even more generous with
her punishment, and suggesting that the man's wife would probably assist
her if informed.

It was about this time that Mozart was implicated by the gossips in a
domestic tragedy. Frau Hofdaemmel was a pupil of Mozart's whose husband
grew fiendishly jealous of her, attacked her with a razor, wounded her
almost to death, and then committed suicide. The story gradually grew up
that Mozart was the cause of the man's jealousy, and Otto Jahn, in his
first edition of his monumental biography, accepted the story, which he
later discarded after Koechel, another biographer, had succeeded in
proving that the assault and suicide took place five days after Mozart's
death. Hofdaemmel seems to have been so far from jealousy of Mozart that
he was one of the elect to whom Mozart applied for a loan. There was,
however, a young and beautiful singer, Henriette Baranius, in Berlin,
who seems to have woven a stray web around Mozart while he was there in
1789--90. She sang in his "Entfuehrung," and it was said that his friends
had to help him out of his entanglement with her. But Jahn scouts the
idea.

Among the most dramatic, and therefore the most familiar incidents of
Mozart's life, is the strange story of the anonymous commission he
received to write a Requiem Mass. We are sure now that it was Count
Walsegg who wished to palm off the composition as one of his own. To
Mozart, however, there was something uncanny in the whole matter, and he
could not work off the suspicious dread that the death-music he was
writing was an omen of his own end. Sho