Still he continued to live with the Webers and to brave out his despair before them all.  He feared to turn to his father for full sympathy, and his fears were apparently justified, for his father seemed only to have answered with rebuking him for his foolish “dreams of pleasure.”  To this ill-timed reproof Mozart answered: 

“What do you mean by dreams of pleasure?  I do not wish to give up dreaming, for what mortal on the whole compass of the earth does not often dream? above all, dreams of pleasure—­peaceful dreams, sweet, cheering dreams, if you will—­dreams which, if realised, would have rendered my life (now far rather sad than happy) more endurable.”

In a few weeks, however, he returned home to Salzburg, and there his cousin the Baesle, who had brightened a part of his trial in Munich, followed him.  And this was in the month of January of the year 1779.

As for Aloysia, she had cause enough to regret jilting one of the greatest, as well as one of the most gentle, souls in the world.  She married the actor Lange and lived unhappily with him.  According to Jahn, each both gave and received cause for jealousy.  Years after, Mozart drifted back into her vicinity under curious circumstances.  The lovers became good friends, and such friends, that for him, at least, Lange could not feel jealousy, according to Jahn, who adds, “Otherwise he would hardly have taken the role of Pierrot in the pantomime in which his wife played Columbine and Mozart the Harlequin.”

Nohl thus sums up the whole affair:  “Neither happiness nor riches brightened Aloysia’s path in life, nor the peace of mind arising from the consciousness of purity of heart.  Not till she was an aged woman, and Mozart long dead, did she recognise what he had really been; she liked to talk about him and his friendship, and in thus recalling the brightest memories of her youth, some of that lovable charm seemed to revive that Mozart had imparted to her and to all with whom he had any intercourse.  Every one was captivated by her gay, unassuming manner, her freedom from all the usual virtuoso caprices in society, and her readiness to give pleasure by her talent to every one, as if a portion of the tender spirit with which Mozart once loved her had passed into her soul and brought forth fresh leaves from a withered stem.  But years of faults and follies intervened for Aloysia.  Meanwhile, he parted from her with much pain, though the esteem with which he had hitherto regarded her was no longer the same.”

* * * * *

Of all strange things in the strange history of lives upon this earth, there cannot be many more strange than this, that Mozart, after being so sadly treated by this woman, should have his next love affair with her youngest sister.  A novelist would not dare tax the credulity of his readers with such a plot.  But such impossibilities and implausibilities belong exclusively to the historian.