Burney met him in 1773 in Paris, where he was living with his wife and niece. In 1775, on his way back home from Paris, he stopped off at Strasburg to meet the poet Klopstock. D.F. Strauss quotes a description by a merchant of Karlsruhe of this scene: "Old Gluck sang and played, _con amore_, many passages from the 'Messiah' set to music by himself; his wife accompanying him in a few other pieces." On the 15th of November, 1787, when Gluck was seventy-three years old, he was at his home in Vienna under doctor's care. After dinner, it was his custom to take coffee out-of-doors, in the free, fresh air and the golden sunlight, where he used to have his piano placed when he would compose. Two old friends from Paris had dined with him, and they were soon to leave. Frau von Gluck left the guests for a moment, to order the carriage. While she was gone, one of the guests declined the liqueur set before him. Now Gluck was always addicted to looking upon the champagne when it was yellow; in fact, he used always to have a bottle at each wing of his piano, when he composed, and was wont to end his compositions, his bottles, and his sobriety in one grand _Fine_. But now he was forbidden to take wine, for fear of heating his blood. On this day, however, he pretended to be angry at his guest for refusing the choice liqueur. In a burlesque rage, he seized the glass, drained it at a gulp, and jokingly begged the guests not to tell his wife. She came back to the room to say that the carriage was ready. Frau von Gluck and the guests left him for half an hour, and he bade them a cheerful farewell. Fifteen minutes later his third stroke of apoplexy attacked him, and his horrified wife returning found him unconscious. In a few hours he was dead. This wife, with whom he lived so congenially, and whose money gave him even more luxury than his operatic success could have procured,--indeed, the very house he died in she had bought for eleven thousand florins,--outlived him less than three years, dying March 12, 1800, at the age of seventy-one. She was buried near him, and her tomb, built by her nephew, has the following epitaph: "Here rests in peace, near her husband, Maria Anne, Edle von Gluck, born Pergin. She was a good Christian, and without ostentation a mother to the poor. She was loved and cherished by all who knew her." ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR