next summer.

In 1836 he visited Frankfort, and made the acquaintance of the widow of
a French clergyman who had preached at the French Reformed Church. The
widow was Madame Jeanrenaud (_nee_ Souchay); she was so well preserved
and handsome that she was credited with having won Mendelssohn's love.
But it was her second daughter, Cecile Charlotte Sophie, who had stuck
the first pin of permanence through his butterfly heart. She was
seventeen and he twenty-seven; he loved beauty, and she was beautiful.

The hyper-romantic Elise Polko often saw Cecile, and described her:

"To the present hour she has always remained my beau ideal of womanly
fascination and loveliness. Her figure was slight, of middle height, and
rather drooping, like a flower heavy with dew; her luxuriant gold-brown
hair fell in rich curls on her shoulders, her complexion was of
transparent delicacy, her smile charming, and she had the most
bewitching deep blue eyes I ever beheld, with dark eyelashes and
eyebrows.... Her whole aspect had a Madonna air, what Berthold Auerbach
so beautifully calls _Marienhaft_. Her manner was generally thought too
reserved; indeed she was considered cold, and called 'the fair Mimosa,'
In music we have an expressive term, 'calm but impassioned,' and this I
deem an appropriate conception for the portrait of Cecile."

Mendelssohn was so surprised at the depth of the impression the young
girl had made upon him that he was worried. To make sure that he was
really at last in love, he went away for a month to take sea-baths at
Scheveningen, near The Hague. But salt water would not wash away his
emotion, and after a month's absence he returned, proposed, and on the
9th of September, 1836, was betrothed. He wrote his mother at once:

"My head is quite giddy from the events of the day; it is already late
at night and I have nothing else to say; but I must write to you, I feel
so rich and happy."

It is a proof of the fondness the people cherished for Mendelssohn that,
when the engagement became noised abroad, the directors of the
Gewandhaus in Leipzig put on the programme the second finale in
"Fidelio," "He who has gained a charming wife" ("_Wer ein holdes Weib
errungen_"). The audience saw the meaning at once and shouted in its
enthusiasm, until Mendelssohn was forced to seat himself at the piano
and extemporise upon the theme.

Felix and Cecile were married March 28, 1837, at the Walloon French
Reformed Church in Frankfort,