“Life has been a little brighter to me of late, since I have mingled more with my fellows.  I think you can have no idea, how sad, how intensely desolate, my life has been during the last two years.  My deafness, like a spectre, appears before me everywhere, so that I flee from society, and am obliged to act the part of a misanthrope, though you know I am not one by nature.  This change has been wrought by a dear, fascinating girl, whom I love, and who loves me.  After two years, I bask again in the sunshine of happiness, and now, for the first time, I feel what a truly happy state marriage might be.  Unfortunately, she is not of my rank in life.  Were it otherwise, I could not marry now, of course; so I must drag along valiantly.  But for my deafness, I should long ago have compassed half the world with my art—­I must do it still.  There exists for me no greater happiness than working at and exhibiting my art.  I will meet my fate boldly.  It shall never succeed in crushing me.”

But Giulietta went over to the great majority of Beethoven’s sweethearts, and married wisely otherwise.  Three years after, at her father’s behest, she wedded a writer of ballet music, the Count Gallenberg, to whom Beethoven later advanced money.  Twenty years afterward, in 1823, Beethoven wrote in one of those conversation-books which his deafness compelled him to use:  “I was well beloved of her, more than ever her husband was loved.  She came to see me and wept, but I scorned her.” (He wrote it in French, “J’etais bien aime d’elle, et plus que jamais son epoux....  Et elle cherche moi pleurant, mais je la meprisais"), and he added:  “If I had parted thus with my strength as well as my life, what would have remained to me for nobler and better things?”

Giulietta was long credited with being the woman to whom he wrote those three famous letters, or rather the one with the two postscripts, found in the secret drawer of an old cabinet after his death, and addressed to his “unsterbliche Geliebte.”  They were written in pencil, and either were copies or first draughts, or were never sent.  They show his Titanic passion in full flame, and are worth quoting entire.  Thayer gives them in an appendix, in the original, but I quote Lady Wallace’s translation, with a few literalising changes: 

“My angel, my all, my self—­only a few words to-day, and they with a pencil (with yours!).  My lodgings cannot be surely fixed until to-morrow.  What a useless loss of time over such things!  Why this deep grief when Necessity decides?—­can our love exist without sacrifices, and by refraining from desiring all things?  Can you alter the fact that you are not wholly mine, nor I wholly yours?  Ah, God! contemplate the beauties of Nature, and reconcile your spirit to the inevitable.  Love demands all, and rightly; so it is with me toward you and with you toward me; but you forget so easily that I must live both for you and for myself.  Were we wholly united, you would feel this sorrow as little as I should.