Let us try now to take a dispassionate view of the case as thus far presented in the pleadings and documents. Not only the law of nature but the laws of the land justified the mother in asserting her right to look after the physical well-being of her child and seeking to enforce it. Dr. Bach seems to have impressed that fact upon Beethoven, wherefore he declares his willingness in the bill of appeal to associate her with himself in the guardianship to that extent. That the Magistrates displayed unusual, not to say unjudicial zeal in her behalf while defending their own course is indubitable; but we are in no position to judge of the propriety of their course, which seems to have been in harmony with the judicial procedure of the place and period, least of all to condemn them, so long as it was permitted them so to do, for having made a stout resistance when their acts were impugned in the appeal to the higher court. The “Exhibit F,” filed in the proceedings before the _Landrecht_, has not been found and its contents can only be guessed at from the allusions to it in the documents. Obviously it contained aspersions on the moral character of Madame van Beethoven, and it may have been, nay, probably was, true that they were unsupported by evidence and therefore undeserving of consideration in a court either of law or equity. Perhaps they were not susceptible of legal proof. It has been thought that Beethoven felt some hesitancy in flaunting evidence of his sister-in-law’s infamy in the face of the world,[27] but he certainly showed no disposition to spare her in his letters, nor did he hesitate to accuse her of unmentionable things by innuendo. In a Conversation Book of this year (1820) he writes of her that she was “born for intrigue, accomplished in deceit, mistress of all the arts of dissimulation.” On the other hand, it is singular that the Magistrates in their final effort to justify their course have nothing to say about the present moral standing of the woman whose legal and natural rights they claimed to be upholding. Were they in ignorance of what we now know, namely, that her conduct had not only been reprehensible in 1811 (though condoned by her husband) but continued so after her husband’s death? Schindler says that she gave birth to a child while the case was pending, and that is confirmed by a statement of Nephew Karl’s widow,[28] that in her old age Madame van Beethoven lived in Baden with this illegitimate daughter, who was also a dissolute woman.