“Heaven help us! _Tarar!_ Ah, dear friend! To think that I should live to see it! Two years ago, when Mozart was writing his _Don Juan_, and that confounded villainous Salieri was also making preparations to repeat the triumph his piece brought him in Paris upon his own territory, and when he and his boon-companions thought they had plucked the _Don Juan_ as they had _Figaro_, leaving it neither dead nor alive to put it upon the stage,--don’t you remember, I then and there took a vow not to go and see the infamous piece, and I kept my word. When everybody rushed to the show--you too, dear Frau Oberst--I sat down quietly by my stove and took my cat upon my lap to spend the evening. But now, think of it! _Tarar_ on the Berlin stage, the work of his bitterest enemy, directed by Mozart! ‘You must come,’ he said to me, ‘though it were only to tell them in Vienna that I do not hurt a hair of his head. I wish he were here himself, the envious knave, to see that there is no need for _me_ to murder another fellow’s thing to remain what I am!’” “Brava! bravissima!” exclaimed Mozart with roaring delight. He took his little wife by the ears, kissing and tickling her, until this bright soap-bubble game of a dreamy future--which, alas! never approximated this happy culmination--ended in mirth and boisterous laughter. Meanwhile they had reached the valley, and were approaching a village which they had noticed from the hill-top, and behind which a pleasant country-house in modern style, the residence of the Count von Schinzberg, became visible. It was their intention to rest and dine in the place. The inn where they stopped was quite at the end of the village, and close beside it a by-road planted with a row of poplars led to the garden of the Count. Mozart left the ordering of dinner to his wife, merely signifying his intention of having a glass of wine in the common room below, while she asked for a drink of water and for a quiet spot in which to enjoy a peaceful hour’s sleep. She was shown up a flight of stairs, her husband following, humming and whistling a tune as he went. In a newly whitewashed room, just aired, there was, among other old-fashioned furniture of noble origin,--which had, no doubt, wandered hither out of the possessions of the Count,--a neat, airy bed, with a painted canopy resting on slender green posts, the silk curtains of which had long ago been replaced by some more common fabric. Constanze exacted a promise from her husband to be waked in time, and bolted the door behind him, he seeking amusement in the common tap-room. There was not a soul there, however, except the host; and, finding the conversation of the latter as little to his taste as the wine, he thought to fill out the time before dinner with a walk to the Count’s park. He was told that respectable strangers were allowed to enter, and, moreover, the family had gone out for a drive.