ies to be my messengers to you. I thought of
getting my letters posted in Paris, so as to arouse your curiosity and
make you believe that I was there. In short a great many quaint notions
came to my head and have only just been dispersed by a postilion's
horn; the fact is, dear Clara, that the postilion has much the same
effect upon me as the most excellent champagne."

Here is perhaps the secret of much of his correspondence; the pure
delight of letting his "fingers chase the pen, and the pen chase the
ink." The aroma of the ink-bottle has run away with how many brains.

He wants to send her "perfect bales of letters," he prefers to write
her at the piano, especially in the chords of the ninth and the
thirteenth. He paints her a pleasant portrait of herself in a letter
which, he says, is written like a little sonata, "namely, a chattering
part, a laughing part, and a talking part."

Clara seemed from his first sight of her to exercise over him a curious
mingling of profound admiration and of teasing amusement. He portrays
her vividly to herself in such words as these:

"Your letter was yourself all over. You stood before me laughing and
talking; rushing from fun to earnest as usual, diplomatically playing
with your veil. In short, the letter was Clara herself, her double."

All these expressions of tenderness and fascinations were ground enough
for the child Clara to build Spanish hopes upon, but in the very same
letter Schumann could refer to that torment of Clara's soul, Ernestine,
and speak of her as "your old companion in joy and sorrow, that bright
star which we can never appreciate enough."

A change, however, seems to have come over Ernestine. Clara found her
taciturn and mistrustful, and when the Baron von Fricken came for her,
Wieck himself wrote in the diary, "We have not missed her; for the last
six weeks she has been a stranger in our house; she had lost completely
her lovable and frank disposition." He compares her to a plant, which
only prospers under attention, but withers and dies when left to
itself. He concludes, "The sun shone too sharply upon her, _i.e._,
Herr Schumann."

But the sun seemed to withdraw from the flower it had scorched. During
her absence, Ernestine wrote to Schumann many letters, chiefly
remarkable for their poor style and their worse grammar. To a man of
the exquisite sensibility of Schumann, and one who took literature so
earnestly, this must have been a constant torture. It