On another side, Grillparzer's character is illumined for us by the strange story of his relations with four Viennese women. He was not a handsome man, but tall, with an abundance of blond hair, and bewitching blue eyes that made him very attractive to the other sex. He, too, was exceedingly sensitive to sexual attraction and in early youth suffered torments from the pangs of unsatisfied longing. From the days when he knew that he was in love, but did not yet know with whom, to the time of final renunciation we find him irresolute, ardent, but apparently selfish in the inability to hazard the discovery that the real might prove inferior to his ideal. Thus his critical disposition invaded even the realm of his affections and embroiled him not merely with the object of them, but also with himself. Charlotte von Paumgarten, the wife of a cousin of Grillparzer's, Marie Däffinger, the wife of a painter, loved him not wisely, but too well; and a young Prussian girl, Marie Piquot, confessed in her last will and testament to such a devotion to him as she was sure no other woman could ever attain, wherefore she commended "her Tasso" to the fostering care of her mother. Grillparzer had experienced only a fleeting interest in Marie Piquot; so much the more lasting was the attachment which bound him to her successful rival, Katharina Fröhlich. Katharina, one of four daughters of a Viennese manufacturer who had seen better days, and, like her sisters, endowed with great artistic talent and practical energy, might have proved the salvation of Grillparzer's existence as a man if he had been more capable of manly resolution, and she had been less like him in impetuosity and stubbornness. They became engaged, they made preparations for a marriage which was never consummated and for years was never definitely abandoned; mutual devotion is ever and anon interrupted by serious or trivial quarrels, and the imperfect relation drags on to the vexation of both, until Grillparzer as an old man of sixty takes lodgings with the Fröhlich sisters and, finally, makes Katharina his sole heir. Grillparzer's development as a poet and dramatist follows the bent of his Austrian genius. One of the first books that he ever read was the text to Mozart's _Magic Flute_. Music, opera, operetta, and fairy drama gave the earliest impulse to his juvenile imagination. Even as a boy he began the voluminous reading which, continued throughout his life, made him one of the best informed men of his time in European literature. History, natural history, and books of travel are followed by the plays of Shakespeare, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, while Gesner's idyls charm him, and he absorbs the stories and romances of Wieland. In 1808 he reads the early works of Schiller and admires the ideal enthusiasm of _Don Carlos_. [Illustration: FRANZ GRILLPARZER AND KAETHI FRÖHLICH IN 1823]