en pretty well proved
that the naive Bettina was an ardent and painstaking forger on a large
scale. She included a series of sonnets which were written to another of
Goethe's "garden of girls" before he ever met Bettina. But she appears
to have vitiated her clever forgeries by a certain alloy of truth, and
it may be that her Beethoven letters are, after all, fictions founded on
fact. The language of these letters is somewhat overstrained, but
Beethoven could rant on occasion, and Ludwig Nohl believed the letters
to be genuine, since a friend of his said he had seen them and
recognised Beethoven's script. Thayer accepts the entanglement with
Bettina as a fact, and thinks it was, at that crisis in Beethoven's
life, "a happy circumstance that Bettina Brentano came, with her beauty,
her charm, and her spirit, to lead his thoughts in other paths."

Wegeler has alluded to the fact that Beethoven's love affairs were
always with women of high degree. But others have called him a
"promiscuous lover," because he once used to stare amorously at a
handsome peasant girl and watch her labouring in the garden, only to be
mocked by her; and more especially because of a memorandum of his pupil
Ries, who wrote: "Beethoven never visited me more frequently than when I
lived in the house of a tailor with three very handsome but thoroughly
respectable daughters." In 1804 Beethoven wrote him a twitting allusion
to these girls. But such a flirtation means little, and besides they
were beauties, these daughters of the tailor. And Beethoven's own mother
was a cook.

Ries describes him as a sad flirt. "Beethoven had a great liking for
female society, especially young and beautiful girls, and often when we
met out-of-doors a charming face, he would turn round, put up his glass,
and gaze eagerly at her, and then smile and nod if he found I was
observing him. He was always falling in love with some one, but
generally his passion did not last long. Once when I teased him on his
conquest of a very beautiful woman, he confessed that she had enchanted
him longest, and most seriously of all--namely, seven whole months!"

Ries also records a humourous scandal of an occasion when he found
Beethoven flirting desperately with a fair unknown; Ries sat down at the
piano and improvised incidental music to Beethoven's directions--
"_amoroso," "a malinconico_" and the like.

Once a devoted admirer, wife of a Vienna pianist, longed for a lock of
the composer's