When she returned she found Suessmayer at his bedside. Mozart was explaining to him how to finish the _Requiem_, remarking as he did so: “Did I not say that I was writing it for myself?” In the evening, the crisis came. Cold applications to his burning head so shattered him that he did not regain consciousness any more. Thirty-five years after his death, his sister-in-law Sophie wrote: “The last thing he did was to endeavor to imitate the kettle-drums in the _Requiem_. I can hear him still.” About midnight he raised himself up. His eyes had a fixed gaze. He then turned his head towards the wall and seemed to drop asleep. He died at one o’clock in the morning, on the 5th day of December, 1791. The last account we have of him says: “It is impossible for me to describe with what an expression of infinite wretchedness his devoted wife cast herself on her knees and called on the Almighty for aid.” She threw herself on his bed, that she might die of the same sickness, as if the cause of his death was some accidental disease. The three medical opinions assigned each a different cause for Mozart’s premature death--inflammation of the brain, purple fever and dropsy! The people walked about his house in the _Rauhenstein’gasse_ in crowds and wept. The poem of the order of Free Masons on the occasion refers, in touching terms, to the way in which he carried assistance to many a poor widow’s hut. The owner of the art-cabinet for whom the two fantasias in F minor were written, came and took an impression of his “pale, dead face” in plaster of Paris. The two sublime funeral odes were now made to serve as his own mausoleum. Van Swieten took charge of his burial. But as he left only sixty guldens, a common grave had to be selected for his body; and thus it happens that we do not know to-day where Mozart’s last resting place is. When Constance, sick and sorrowful, went to the churchyard, some time after the grave-digger had been replaced by another, who could not point out where all that was mortal of our artist lay. Not a friend followed his bier to the cemetery. All turned back at the gate, on account of the bad weather. Mozart’s skull, however, was saved, and is preserved in Vienna. The churchyard keeper’s son secretly abstracted it from the grave.