It seems that she had promised him her picture!  She sends it later, and it is still in the Mozart Museum, showing her, as Jahn declares, to have a good-natured and cheerful face, and rather a stocky figure; he adds, “Without being beautiful she seems right pleasing.”  It is certain that in whatever butterfly humour Mozart regarded her, she took him and his kisses and his flowery declarations seriously.  Had he not said in this very letter, “love me as I love you, and then we shall never cease loving each other?” Had he not thence broken into French?

“Je vous baise vos mains,—­votre visage—­afin, tout ce que vous me permettez de baiser.  Je suis de tout mon coeur,” etc.

His sister later had a target painted for a club of Salzburg friends who met for crossbow practice, and the target represented “the melancholy farewell of two persons dissolved in tears, Wolfgang and the Baesle.”

His flirtations with his cousin seemed to have angered his father, who was eager for him to go to France and conquer Paris.  The father was the more indignant as Mozart was at the same time becoming entangled with Aloysia Weber—­of whom more later.  Mozart loved his father and treated him with the utmost respect, but he could rise to a sense of his own dignity when the occasion demanded, and he wrote him: 

“The bitter way in which you write about my merry and innocent intercourse with your brother’s daughter, makes me justly indignant; but it is not as you think.  I require to give you no answer on the subject.”

A few days later he writes to his cousin with all the old hilarity, his letter being mostly in doggerel rhyme beginning: 

“You may think or believe that I have croaked (crepirt) or kicked the bucket (verreckt).  But I beg you not to think so, for how could I write so beautifully if I were dead?”

Nearly a year later he writes to her regretting that he could not have her visit him at Kaisersheim, and begging her to meet him in Munich.

In Munich it was Mozart’s fate to find a tragedy awaiting him, for Aloysia (whom he had loved as solemnly as he had loved his cousin frivolously, and to whom he looked forward longingly after his long absence) showed herself indifferent.  He had planned that his cousin should “have a great part to play in this meeting with Aloysia.”  This I would rather interpret as evidence that Mozart was quite ignorant of any deep affection in his cousin.  There is nothing in his life that shows him as anything other than the most tender-hearted of men, and it is inconceivable that he should have brought his cousin to Munich simply to drag her at the chariot of his triumph with Aloysia.

And yet his flirtation with the Baesle certainly went past mere bantering and repartee.  She stayed several weeks in Munich and must have furnished Mozart grateful diversion from his humiliation.  She went with him to Salzburg and later, when she returned to her own home, we find him writing with the same exuberance, addressing her as—­