ke Clara
suspect Schumann's fidelity, and he gave the love affair as unpleasant
a notoriety as possible. For an instance of senile spite: Clara had
always been given a Behrens piano for her concerts in Berlin. Wieck
wrote to a friend to go to Behrens, and warn him that he must not lend
Clara his pianos, because she was used to the hard English action, and
would ruin any others! He wrote that he hoped the honour of the King of
Prussia would prevent his disobedient daughter from appearing in public
concerts in Berlin. It need hardly be said that Clara was neither
forbidden her piano nor her concerts; indeed, the king appeared in
person at her concert and applauded the runaway vigorously. By a
curious chance at the end of her _piece de resistance_, a string broke
on the piano; but as a correspondent of Schumann's paper wrote, it came
"just at the end, like a cry of victory." After this, Wieck wrote to
Behrens protesting against his lending a hand to "a demoralised girl
without shame." Clara learned that such of her letters as had gone
through the Wieck home were opened, and she received an anonymous
letter which she knew must have been dictated by her father. Her
suspicions were later proved. The worst of the affair was the
diabolical malice that led Wieck to have the letter put into her hand
just before her chief Berlin concert.

Next, he announced that his reason for not granting his consent was
that Schumann was a drunkard. Robert found witnesses enough to be
sponsors for his high respectability, but the accusation was a
staggering blow in the midst of the deep melancholia into which the
endless struggle and the recent death of Henrietta Voigt had plunged
him. Clara had the rare agony of seeing him weep. It was now the turn
of the strong Clara to break down, and only with the doctor's aid she
continued her concerts. Her father's effort to undermine her good name
extended to the publication of a lithographed account of his side of
the story. But while certain old friends snubbed her, the lies that
were told against her met their truest answer in the integrity of her
whole career, and in the purity and honour of her life. This her own
father was the first and the last ever to slander.

It is noteworthy, in view of the lightness of so many of the love
affairs of the musicians, such as the case of Liszt, who twice eloped
with married women and discussed the formality of divorce afterward,
that through the long and ardent