tuted just like themselves, for they understand exactly so
much of us as we have in common with them, but they do not know how
little, how infinitesimally little this is.
--WAGNER: _Letter to Liszt_.

Beethoven was in no sense a hero to his servants. In their eyes he was
not the great artist, whose achievement was to go ringing down the ages;
he was simply a crank or madman, who did not know his own mind half the
time, from whom abuse was as likely to be predicated as gratuities, who
could be ridiculed, neglected, circumvented with impunity. When the
dereliction became glaring enough to arrest his attention, he would
deliver himself of a volley of abuse which sometimes had to be made good
by presents of money. At other times, he desired nothing so much as to
be left alone.

That he found the world a more difficult problem than ever in these
later years, goes without saying. "Have you been patient with every one
to-day?" he asks himself in one of the note-books of this period,
indicating the dawn of a perception that fate is too much for him, that
it can be defied no longer, but rather must be propitiated. Had he
answered his question, it would no doubt have been in the negative; but
this attitude, so new to him, is significant. It comes up also in his
letters to Zmeskall, in which he speaks of his patience in enduring the
insolence of a butler, who had been sent him by Zmeskall.

Complaints about servants appear frequently in his correspondence.
Peppe, the "elephant-footed," and Nanny, who seems to have had a
particular faculty for making trouble, are specially in evidence. "I
have endured much from N. (Nanny) to-day," he writes in a letter to his
good friend Madame Streicher, who was very helpful to him in his
domestic matters. On one occasion, when her conduct became unbearable,
he threw books at her head. Strangely, this method of disciplining the
refractory Nanny produced better results than could have been expected.
He reports soon after to Madame Streicher, "Miss Nanny is a changed
creature since I threw the half dozen books at her head. Possibly, by
chance some of their contents may have entered her brain, or her bad
heart. At all events we now have a repentant deceiver."

In another letter of this time he writes to the same lady, "Yesterday
morning the devilry began again, but I made short work of it, and threw
the heavy settle at B (another servant), af