Leopold answers in the violent tone he could adopt on occasions, and tries to distract his son’s attention by appealing to his ambition.  He asks him to decide whether he wishes to become “a commonplace artist whom the world will forget, or a celebrated capellmeister of whom posterity will read years after in books,—­whether, infatuated with a pretty face you one day breathe your last on a straw sack, your wife and children in a state of starvation, or, after a well-spent Christian life, you die in honour and independence and your family well provided for....  Get to Paris without delay, take your place by the side of really great people. Aut Caesar ant nihil.”

Little the father could have realised how much truth there was to be in the dark side of his prophecy; and that, too, in spite of the fact that his son took his advice.  Leaving Aloysia behind, the son and his mother went to Paris.

He landed there in the very midst of the tempest raging around Gluck.  Paris did not at all please Mozart, and the French people disgusted him.  For this Paris was not entirely to blame, seeing that Mozart had gone there unwillingly and was parted from his beloved Aloysia.  It was in Paris, too, that his mother died.  And now, while he was so deeply concerned for Aloysia’s career and was trying so desperately to secure her an engagement in Paris, she was blandly forgetting him.  Of this, however, he had no suspicion until he reached Munich, where she, the star of his heart and of his ambition, was waiting for him.

What the change was that had come over Aloysia it is impossible to tell.  The first thought is that, having risen to prominence by Mozart’s tuition and assistance, she spurned the ladder that had uplifted her.  But Nohl’s theory that her head was turned by her admission to the favour that quickly surrounds the successful prima donna is hardly to be held, in view of the fact that in rejecting a man of Mozart’s prominence she took the actor Lange, who had little, if any, more prominence.  It was doubtless simply the old story of the one who loves and the other who lets herself be loved, just to keep up practice, until she learns to love elsewhere.

When Mozart reached Munich, he was still in mourning for his mother, and dressed according to the French custom of the time, in red coat with black buttons.  He hurried to meet Aloysia and felt at once the chill of her jilt.  The lips once so warm under his gave him merely the formal German kiss.  She seemed scarcely to recognise the one for whose sake once she shed so many tears.  Whereupon Mozart immediately flung himself upon the piano stool and sang, in a loud voice, with forced gaiety, “Ich lass das Maedel gern das mich nicht will,”—­which you might translate, “Gladly I give up the girl that gives up me.”  It was on Christmas Day that Mozart had hastened to the presence of his beloved.  For the Christmas gift she gave him back his heart! and right gallantly he took it.  But his gaiety was hollow, and when he went to the house of a friend he locked himself in a room and wept for days.