must one fly from what he so fondly loves? and yet my existence in W——­was as miserable as here.  Your love made me at once the most happy and the most unhappy of men.  At my age, life requires a uniform equality; can this be found in our mutual relations?  Angel!  I have this moment heard that the post goes every day, so I must conclude, that you may get this letter the sooner.  Be calm! for we can only attain our object of living together by the calm contemplation of our existence.  Be calm—­love me—­to-day—­yesterday—­ what longings with tears for you—­you! you!—­my life!—­my all!  Farewell!  Oh! love me well—­and never doubt the faithful heart of your beloved L.

“Ever thine.

“Ever mine.

“Ever each other’s.”

These impassioned letters to his “immortal beloved” were believed by Schindler to have been intended for Giulietta, and dated by him at first in 1803 and then in 1806.  But Thayer, after showing how careless Beethoven was of dates, and how inaccurate, decides that these letters could not have been written before 1804.  Since Giulietta was married Nov. 3, 1803, to Count Gallenberg, she could not have been the one whose life he hoped to share.

Who then remains?  Thayer suggests that the woman thus honoured may have been another Therese, the Countess Therese von Brunswick.  She was the cousin of Giulietta, whose husband said of Beethoven that Therese “adored him.”  About the time of these letters, he wrote to her brother, “Kiss your sister Therese,” and later he dedicated to her his sonata, Op. 78.  Some months after this he gave up his marriage scheme.  Of Therese, Thayer says that she lived to a great age—­“ca va sans dire!—­” and was famed for a noble and large-hearted, but eccentric character.  As for remembrance of Beethoven, one may apply to her the words of Shakespeare, ‘She died and gave no sign.’  Was it perhaps that she did not dare?

Even after seeing the above words in type, I am able to add something more definite to Thayer’s argument—­if one is to believe a book I stumbled on in an old bookshop, and have not found mentioned in any of the Beethoven bibliographies.  The book bears every sign of telling the truth, as it makes no effort at the charms of fiction.  It is by Miriam Tenger, who claims to have known the Countess Therese well for many years, and who describes the adoration with which her friends regarded her, the painter Peter von Cornelius calling her “the most remarkable woman I have ever known.”

“She was a scholar in the classics, a piano pupil of Mozart and Beethoven,” he went on, “and a woman who must have been rarely beautiful in her youth.  Only a perfectly pure spirit could give the gentle look in her large, dark eyes.  She spoke with inimitable beauty and clearness, because she was inwardly so transparent and beautiful, almost like a beatified spirit.”