die with him. Her grief
was indeed so fierce that it broke her health completely. She was taken
to the home of a friend, and by the time of his funeral she was unable
to leave the house. On that day so furious a tempest raged that the
friends decided not to follow the coffin through the driving rain and
sleet. So the body went unattended to the cemetery and was thrust into a
pauper's grave, three corpses deep.

It was some time before Constanze was strong enough to leave the house.
She then went to the cemetery to find the grave. It could not be
identified, and never since has it been found. No one had tipped the old
sexton to strengthen his memory of the resting-place, and it was a new
and ignorant sexton that greeted the anxious Constanze.

There are those who speak ill of this devoted wife, and even Mr.
Krehbiel, whose book of essays I have quoted from with such pleasure,
speaks of Constanze as "indifferent to the disposition of the mortal
remains of her husband whose genius she never half appreciated."

For this and other slighting allusions to Constanze in other
biographies, there exists absolutely no supporting evidence. But for the
highest praise of her wifely devotion, her patience and unchanging
love, and for her lofty admiration of Mozart, both as man and musician,
there is a superfluity of proof.

After his death she found herself in the deepest financial distress and
was compelled to appeal to the emperor for a small pension, which he
granted. Her nobility of character can be seen also in the concert of
her husband's works, which she arranged, and with such success that she
paid all Mozart's debts, some three thousand gulden ($1,500). Thus she
took the last stain from his memory. She also interested herself, like
Mrs. Purcell, in the publication of her husband's compositions. She was
only twenty-seven when he died, and her interest in his honour, as well
as the conspicuous motherliness she showed to the children he had left
her, were all the more praiseworthy. Neimtschek, who published a
biography of Mozart in 1798, emphasises her fidelity to "our Raphael of
Music," her grief still keen for him, and her devotion to the children
he left fatherless and penniless.

For eighteen years Constanze mourned her husband. Indeed, she never
ceased to mourn him. But, after nearly a score of years, in 1809, when
she had reached the age of forty-five, she was sought in marriage by a
councillor from Denmark, George Ni