The Messmer family had offered Mozart apartments in their house in the suburbs, but he could not make up his mind to accept the offer: "The house is not what it was," he writes to his sister (December 15, 1781). Messmer had staying with him at the time Vine. Righini (1756-1812), formerly an opera-buffa singer and then a composer; they were on very intimate terms, and Madame Messmer was especially friendly to Righini. The latter, as Mozart informs his father in answer to his inquiries, makes a great deal of money by giving lessons, and his cantata (probably "Il Natale d' Apollo") had been given twice during Lent with great success. "He writes _prettily_; is not superficial, but a great thief. He gives back his stolen goods so unblushingly and in such overflowing abundance that people can hardly digest them" (August 29, 1781).[2] Another musical family would have been glad to receive him as an inmate, and his father appears to have been not unwilling that he should form a closer connection in this case. Wolfgang had been introduced to Herr Aurnhammer, whose "fat lady-daughter" Josephine was considered one of the first clavier-players of the day. They received him kindly, and often invited him, as he informs his father (June 27, 1781): "I dine almost daily with Herr Aurnhammer; the young lady is a horror--but she plays divinely; she seems {COURTSHIP.} (252) to lose her really refined taste in singing, however, and drags everything."[3] It would have been convenient to them that Mozart should be in their immediate neighbourhood. But he was far from satisfied with the quarters which they offered him; it was a room "for rats and mice, but not for human beings. The stairs need a lantern to light them at noonday; and the room might be called a _cell._ The wife herself called the house a rat's nest--in fact it was really dreadful." Nor did he feel any inclination for closer intercourse with this family, whose motives in wishing for him he believed that he saw through. Seeing that his father had set his mind upon his going, he felt constrained to set the two sides of the question before him. The description which follows is somewhat "schlimm" certainly, but too characteristic of the writer to be omitted:--