In spite of his deafness, rudeness, and eccentricity Beethoven seems to have had no small degree of fascination for women. He was continually in love, writing sincere and charming letters to his ‘immortal Beloved,’ and planning more than once, with almost pathetic tenderness, for marriage and a home. There is a genuine infatuation, an ardent young-lover-like exultation in courtship that lifts him for a time even out of his art and leaves him wholly a man--a man, however, whose passion was always stayed and ennobled by spiritual bonds. License and immorality had no attraction for him, even when all his hopes of marriage were frustrated. Talented and lovely women accepted his admiration--Magdelena Willman, the singer, Countess Giulia Guicciardi, Therese Malfatti, Countess von Brunswick, Bettina Brentano, the ‘Sybil of romantic literature’--one after another received his addresses, possibly returned in a measure his love, and, presently, married someone else. Beethoven was undoubtedly deeply moved at these successive disappointments. ‘Oh, God!’ he writes, ‘let me at last find her who is destined to be mine, and who shall strengthen me in virtue.’ But, though he was destined never to be happy in this way, his thwarted love wrecked neither his art nor his happiness. He writes to Ries in 1812, in a tone almost of contentment and resignation: ‘All kind messages to your wife, unfortunately I have none. I found one who will probably never be mine, nevertheless, I am not on that account a woman hater.’ The truth is, music was in reality his only mistress, and his plans for a more practical domesticity were like clouds temporarily illumined by the sun of his own imagination, and predestined to be as fleeting. As has been noted, toward the end of his life most of the intimacies and associations with the fashionable circles of Vienna gradually ceased. During the early part of his last illness the brother Johann, a few musicians and an occasional stranger were among his visitors, and until December of the year 1826 the nephew made his home with Beethoven. But Johann returned to his property, Carl rejoined his regiment, much to the added comfort of the sick man, and the visits from outsiders grew fewer in number. The friends of earlier days--those whom he had honored by his dedications or who had profited by the production of his works, as well as those who had suffered from his violence and abuse--nearly all were either dead or unable to attend him in his failing strength. Only the Breunings and Schindler remained actively faithful till the last.