These instances of puppy-love can have given little anxiety to the father and mother; but soon old Leopold began to fear that this amorous activity might interfere with his son’s wedlock to his art.  When, therefore, he was sixteen years old and began to take a solemn interest in an opera singer at Munich, to weep over the beauty of her singing, and to seek her acquaintance, the father began to protest.  This was Mlle. Keiserin, the daughter of a cook, and Mozart was later a little ashamed of his easy enthusiasm.

There seems to be an implied affair, perhaps more serious, in this letter to his father, dated 1777—­he was born in 1756: 

“As to the baker’s daughter, I have no objection to make; I foresaw all this long ago.  This was the cause of my reluctance to leave home, and finding it so difficult to go.  I hope the affair is not by this time known all over Salzburg.  I beg you, dear papa, most urgently to keep the matter quiet as long as possible, and in the meantime to pay her father on my account any expense he may have incurred by her entrance into the convent, which I will repay gladly when I return to Salzburg.”

Meanwhile he was well immersed in his dalliance with his Baesle, or cousin.  In 1777, when Mozart was twenty-one and travelling on a concert-tour with his mother, he met, at Augsburg, Marianne Mozart, the daughter of his uncle, a book-binder.  His experience at Augsburg with certain impertinent snobs disgusted him with the place, and he wrote his father that the meeting with his fair cousin was the only compensation of visiting the town.  He found her “pretty, intelligent, lovable, clever, and gay,” and, like him, “rather inclined to be satirical.”

They struck up a correspondence which shows him in most hilarious moods.  His letters are full of that possenhaften Jargon with which he sprinkled his letters to his sister.  He calls his cousin by the pet name of Baesle, with which he rhymes “Haesle,” a colloquial word for “rabbit.”  His first letter to her overflows with nonsense and meaningless rhymes, puns, and quibbles, such as: 

“Ich hoffe, Sie werden auch meinen Brief—­trief, welchen ich Ihnen aus Mannheim geschrieben erhalten haben—­schaben.  Desto besser, besser desto!”

Lady Wallace has made a translation which reproduces well the nonsense if not literally the sense.  This is a sample: 

“My dear Coz-Buzz:—­I have safely received your precious epistle—­thistle, and from it I perceive—­achieve, that my aunt—­gaunt, and you—­shoe, are quite well—­bell.  I have to-day a letter—­setter, from my papa—­ah-ha, safe in my hands—­sands.”

A week later he writes her a letter beginning: 

“My dear niece, cousin, daughter! mother, sister, and wife!—­Potz Himmel!  Croatians, demons, witches, hags, and cross batteries!  Potz Element! air, earth, fire and water!  Europe, Asia, Africa, and America!  Jesuits, Augustines, Benedictines, Capucins, Minorites, Franciscans, Dominicans, Carthusians, and Knights of the Cross! privateers, canons regular and irregular, sluggards, rascals, scoundrels, imps, and villains all! donkeys, buffaloes, oxen, fools, blockheads, numskulls, and foxes!  What means this?  Four soldiers and three shoulder-belts!  Such a packet and no portrait!”