“He was never tried by poverty, or disappointment, or ill-health, or a morbid temper, or neglect, or the perfidy of friends, or any of the other great ills which crowded so thickly around Beethoven, Schubert, or Schumann.  Who can wish that he had been? that that bright, pure, aspiring spirit should have been dulled by distress or torn with agony?  It might have lent a deeper undertone to his songs or have enabled his Adagios to draw tears where now they only give a saddened pleasure.  But let us take the man as we have him.  Surely there is enough of conflict and violence in life and in art.  When we want to be made unhappy we can turn to others.  It is well in these agitated modern days to be able to point to one perfectly balanced nature, in whose life, whose letters, and whose music alike, all is at once manly and refined, clever and pure, brilliant and solid.  For the enjoyment of such shining heights of goodness we may well forego for once the depths of misery and sorrow.”

In November, 1835, Mendelssohn’s father died, among his last wishes being the wish that his son should marry, as the two sisters already had.  The blow to Mendelssohn was exceedingly severe, and his condition alarmed his sister, who urged upon him his father’s advice.  Mendelssohn told her that he would look about him on the Rhine next summer.

In 1836 he visited Frankfort, and made the acquaintance of the widow of a French clergyman who had preached at the French Reformed Church.  The widow was Madame Jeanrenaud (nee Souchay); she was so well preserved and handsome that she was credited with having won Mendelssohn’s love.  But it was her second daughter, Cecile Charlotte Sophie, who had stuck the first pin of permanence through his butterfly heart.  She was seventeen and he twenty-seven; he loved beauty, and she was beautiful.

The hyper-romantic Elise Polko often saw Cecile, and described her: 

“To the present hour she has always remained my beau ideal of womanly fascination and loveliness.  Her figure was slight, of middle height, and rather drooping, like a flower heavy with dew; her luxuriant gold-brown hair fell in rich curls on her shoulders, her complexion was of transparent delicacy, her smile charming, and she had the most bewitching deep blue eyes I ever beheld, with dark eyelashes and eyebrows....  Her whole aspect had a Madonna air, what Berthold Auerbach so beautifully calls Marienhaft.  Her manner was generally thought too reserved; indeed she was considered cold, and called ‘the fair Mimosa,’ In music we have an expressive term, ‘calm but impassioned,’ and this I deem an appropriate conception for the portrait of Cecile.”

Mendelssohn was so surprised at the depth of the impression the young girl had made upon him that he was worried.  To make sure that he was really at last in love, he went away for a month to take sea-baths at Scheveningen, near The Hague.  But salt water would not wash away his emotion, and after a month’s absence he returned, proposed, and on the 9th of September, 1836, was betrothed.  He wrote his mother at once: