n a little time he fell in debt; took up with virtuosi;
began to read Voltaire, and talk against religion in his drink. From
the rank of genius, he was fast degenerating into that of profligate:
his affairs grew more and more embarrassed; and he had no gift of
putting any order in them. Prudence was not one of Schubart's virtues;
the nearest approximation he could make to it was now and then a
little touch of cunning. His wife still loved him; loved him with that
perverseness of affection, which increases in the inverse ratio of its
requital: she had long patiently endured his follies and neglect,
happy if she could obtain a transient hour of kindness from him. But
his endless course of riot, and the straits to which it had reduced
their hapless family, at length overcame her spirits: she grew
melancholy, almost broken-hearted; and her father took her home to
him, with her children, from the spendthrift who had been her ruin.
Schubart's course in Ludwigsburg was verging to its close; his
extravagance increased, and debts pressed heavier and heavier on him:
for some scandal with a young woman of the place, he was cast into
prison; and let out of it, with an injunction forthwith to quit the
dominions of the Grand Duke.

Forlorn and homeless, here then was Schubart footing the hard highway,
with a staff in his hand, and one solitary _thaler_ in his purse, not
knowing whither he should go. At Heilbronn, the Buergermeister Wachs
permitted him to teach his Buergermeisterinn the harpsichord; and
Schubart did not die of hunger. For a space of time he wandered to and
fro, with numerous impracticable plans; now talking for his victuals;
now lecturing or teaching music; kind people now attracted to him by
his genius and misfortunes, and anon repelled from him by the faults
which had abased him. Once a gleam of court-preferment revisited his
path: the Elector Palatine was made acquainted with his gifts, and
sent for him to Schwetzingen to play before him. His playing gratified
the Electoral ear; he would have been provided for, had he not in
conversation with his Highness happened to express a rather free
opinion of the Mannheim Academy, which at that time was his Highness's
hobby. On the instant of this luckless oversight, the door of
patronage was slammed in Schubart's face, and he stood solitary on the
pavement as before.

One Count Schmettau took pity on him; offered him his purse and home;
both of which the way-worn wanderer