We have said that he deferred to Haydn's criticism, but he went beyond it. If the C minor trio was not to be published, neither should the other two. So the unlucky works were thrust back into his portfolio, where they lay for two years, during which the irate composer paved the way for their proper reception by publishing an immense number of bagatelles, especially variations on different themes, which have no great value beyond that attached to them as studies in the development of Beethoven's genius. Although evincing more ingenuity and variety than the themes treated by Mozart in the same way, they are often found unequal to the latter in clearness.[14] Beethoven seems to have had a lingering partiality for this style of writing. After having abandoned it, we find it adopted again in the Thirty-two Variations Sérieuses on an original theme, which were written after he had more than established his success in the Sonata form; and, so anxious was he to have them well understood and rendered, that he made Ries, when studying them with him, repeat the last no fewer than seventeen times before he was satisfied with the effect; "though," adds Ries rather naïvely, "I thought I played it as well as Beethoven himself!" The growth of the Thirty-three Variations, Op. 120, we must leave to Schindler to relate:-- "In the villa of Hetzendorf, Beethoven wrote the Thirty-three Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli, a work which delighted him uncommonly. At first there were only to be six or seven variations, for which modest number Diabelli had offered him eighty ducats (the price he received for almost each of his later Sonatas). But when he set to work, there sprang into life first ten, then twenty, then twenty-five--and still he could not stop. When Diabelli heard of the twenty-five variations, he was greatly concerned lest the work should be too large, but was at last obliged to accept for his eighty ducats, not _seven_, but _three and thirty variations_." The following story is a proof of the ease with which he invented variations. Being one evening in a box with a lady during a performance of "La Molinare," she lamented to him that she had once possessed a number of variations on the air "Nel cor non più mi sento," which she had lost. Next morning she received "Sei variazioni perdute per la--ritrovate per Luigi v. Beethoven."