rtly before his father had died,
Mozart had written him a letter begging him to be reconciled to death
when it should come, and speaking of death as "this good and faithful
friend of man," and adding: "I never lie down at night without thinking,
young as I am, that I may be no more before the morning dawns."

Constanze, having been away for the cure at Baden, returned to find him
suddenly declining in health. To divert him, she took him for a drive,
but he could talk only of his death and of his morbid conviction that he
had been poisoned. Constanze, greatly alarmed, called in the family
physician, Doctor Closset. He blamed Mozart's state to overwork and
overabsorption in the composition of the Requiem Mass, which he toiled
at and brooded over until he swooned away in his chair.

After a brief recovery of spirits, he sank rapidly again and could not
leave his bed. Constanze attended him devoutly, and her younger sister,
Sophie, and her mother, now much endeared to Mozart, were very
solicitous and attentive. It is Sophie who described in a letter the
last hours of this genius, who died at the age of thirty-five. Mozart,
even in his ultimate agonies, was most solicitous for his wife, and said
to Sophie that she must spend the night at the house and see him die.
When she tried to speak more cheerfully, he would only answer:

"I have the taste of death on my tongue; I smell the grave. And who can
comfort my Constanze if you do not stay here?"

Sophie went home to tell her mother, and Constanze followed her to the
door, begging her, for God's sake, to go to the priests at St. Peter's
and ask one of them to call, as if by chance. But the priests hesitated
for some time, and she had great difficulty in persuading one of "these
unchristian Fathers" to do as she wished.

After a long search the family doctor was found at the theatre, but he
would not come until the end of the piece, and then ordered cold
applications to Mozart's feverish head, which shocked him into
unconsciousness. He died at one o'clock in the morning of November 5,
1791, and the last movement of his lips was an effort to direct where
the kettledrums should be sounded in his Requiem. The ruling passion!

Crowds, the next day, passed the house of Mozart and wept before his
windows. As for Constanze, her grief was boundless, and she stretched
herself out upon his bed in the hope of being attacked by his disease,
thought to be malignant typhus. She wished to