Concerning the details of the always disgraceful and at the end tragical conduct of Beethoven’s nephew much obscurity is left after the most painstaking study of the evidence to be found in the contemporary documents which have been preserved; but it is to these documents that appeal must be made if the truth is to be learned, not to the generalizations of romancing biographers. Twenty-nine letters written by Beethoven to the youth came into the hands of Beethoven after the attempt at suicide and through Schindler into the Royal Library at Berlin. However they may be viewed, they are a pathetic monument. They are a deeply affecting memorial of his almost idolatrous love for one wholly unworthy to receive it; but they also help measurably to explain why Beethoven defeated his own benevolent intentions. In them the paradoxes in his nature are piled one on top of the other. Alternately they breathe tender affection, gentle admonition and violent accusation; pride in the lad’s mental gifts, hope for his future, and loathing of his conduct; proclamations of his own self-sacrificing devotion set off against his ward’s ingratitude; pleadings that the boy love him and hate his mother; proud condemnation and piteous prayers for forgiveness; petitions for the boy’s reformation and promises of betterment in his own conduct. They give out the light in which the story must be told, though they contribute but little to the record of concrete facts. They leave us to conjecture and surmise as to many of the nephew’s motives and actual doings. It is from the pages of the Conversation Books of 1825 and 1826 that practically all of the attested truth concerning the happenings, their causes and effects, must be learned. Letters and these records of conversations are at the base of the following recital.[159] [Sidenote: STUDY BECOMES IRKSOME TO KARL]