. That Clara should
renounce all claims as to her inheritance. 6. That the marriage should
take place September 29, 1839.

This insolent and mercenary protocol drove Clara to bay. She wrote her
father from the depths of grief, and declared to him finally that she
would wed Schumann on the 24th of June. Schumann wrote a short note to
the old man, telling him that if he did not hear in eight days, silence
would be taken as the last refusal. The answer was simply a letter from
Frau Wieck, acknowledging Schumann's "impertinent letter," and saying
that Wieck would not hold any communication with him.

Then the lawsuit began. On the 16th of July he made his appeal and
wrote to Clara that she must be personally present in six or seven
weeks. She had written him a letter of great cheer and sent him from
Paris a portrait she had had painted and a cigar case she had made with
her own hands.

On her way home Clara stopped at Berlin, where her own mother lived as
the wife of Bargiel.

Clara's life under her father's guardianship had gradually drifted
almost out of the ken of her own mother. Her stepmother had done
everything possible to make her life miserable, spying upon her and
making it impossible to be alone long enough to write Schumann a
letter. Now, in her loneliness, Clara turned to the woman whose flesh
she was; and she found there an immediate and passionate support.

From Wieck and the Wieck family, Clara had received while in Paris not
one penny of money and not a single trinket. They always wrote her:
"You have your own money." This grieved her deeply, and her father's
sending her to Paris without a chaperon of any kind and writing her
never a word of tenderness but only and always reproaches, had orphaned
her indeed. Her heart was doubly ripe for a little mothering, and Frau
Bargiel seized the moment. She wrote letters of greatest warmth and
sweetness to her child in Paris, and to Schumann she wrote an
invitation to come to Berlin. He accepted and spent several pleasant
days. Frau Bargiel wrote Clara how she had delighted in the talent and
person of Schumann, and Robert wrote her how fine a mother she had. On
the 14th of August, Clara and her friend Henrietta Reissman left Paris.

Meanwhile Schumann had sunk into another awesome abyss of melancholia.
The humiliation of having to go to law for his wife, and airing the
family scandal in public, crushed him to the dust. He wrote his friend
Becker: "I hardly think