elationship,
although, I dare say, I should find it easy enough."

Ernestine, like Robert, was a pupil and boarder at the home of the
Wiecks. She and Robert had acted as godparents to one of Wieck's
children, possibly Clara's half-sister, Marie, also in later years a
prominent pianist and teacher.

The affair with Ernestine grew more serious. In 1834 he wrote a letter
of somewhat formal and timid devotion to her. A little later, with fine
diplomacy, he also wrote a fatherly letter to her supposed father,
praising some of the baron's compositions with certain reservations,
and adding, as a _coup de grace_, the statement that he himself was
writing some variations on a theme of the baron's own.

The same month Ernestine and Robert became engaged. He was deeply,
joyously fond of her, and he poured out his soul to her friend, who was
also a distinguished musician, Henrietta Voigt. To her he wrote of
Ernestine:

"Ernestine has written to me in great delight. She has sounded her
father by means of her mother; and he gives her to me! Henrietta, he
gives her to me! do you understand that? And yet I am so wretched; it
seems as though I feared to accept this jewel, lest it should be in
unworthy hands. If you ask me to put a name to my grief I cannot do it.
I think it is grief itself; but alas, it may be love itself, and mere
longing for Ernestine. I really cannot stand it any longer, so I have
written to her to arrange a meeting one of these days. If you should
ever feel thoroughly happy, then think of two souls who have placed all
that is most sacred to them in your keeping, and whose future happiness
is inseparably bound up with your own."

This Madame Voigt, who died at the age of thirty-one, once said that on
a beautiful summer evening, she and Schumann, after playing various
music, had rowed out in a boat, and, shipping the oars, had sat side by
side in complete silence--that deathlike silence which so often
enveloped Schumann even in the circles of his friends at the taverns.
When they returned after a mute hour, Schumann pressed her hand and
exclaimed, "Today we have understood each other perfectly."

It was under Ernestine's inspiration, which Schumann called "a perfect
godsend," that he fashioned the various jewels that make up the music
of his "Carneval," using for his theme the name of Ernestine's
birthplace, "Asch," which he could spell in music in two ways:
A-ES-C-H, or AS-C-H, for ES is the German name for E