The detailed account of this sojourn in Paris is to be found in Mozart’s own letters. It is a very vivid one, very clear, and the language used is frequently very strong. The letters themselves constitute a piece of the history of the art, and culture of the Paris of the time. The death of his mother, the result of a way of living to which she was not used and of great depression of spirits, had a very sad effect on his mind. But when he saw that he had no need to worry, at least about his father, he felt greatly encouraged, and the prospect of writing an opera for Paris infused new life into the sluggish blood of our young artist. A cheering evidence of this is to be found in the so-called French symphony which he wrote just at this time; and we can see what purely external cause it was that gave it its peculiarly lively tone. It was the character of the French themselves, with their peculiar love of life and of the external. All his hearers were carried away by a lively passage of this kind in the very beginning, but in the finale he took the liberty with his ingenuous musical audience to crack a joke like that subsequently played by Haydn in London, by the beating of the kettle-drum suddenly to attract the attention of the listeners. Contrary to the custom usual in Paris, he had two violins to begin to play _piano_, immediately followed by a _forte_. When they were playing _piano_ a sound of sh-sh-sh--called for a dead silence; but “the moment his audience heard the _forte_, they broke out into hand-clapping and applause.” Thus adroitly and immediately did he employ in Paris the manner of working up a climax which he had noticed in Mannheim. But envy and intrigue still dogged him. He fairly dazzled the Italian maestro, Cambini, the very first time he met him. Mozart played one of Cambini’s quartets from memory, and executed it in such a manner, that the latter exclaimed: “What a head that man has!” Cambini, after this, took care that no more of Mozart’s compositions should be performed in public, and hence he had to resort once more to the giving of lessons in music, to make ends meet. This was exceedingly difficult in Paris, and especially for an artist who, as he himself wrote at the time, was, so to say, “sunk in music--one whose thoughts it always occupied, and who liked to speculate, study and reflect the live-long day.”