He told Fraeulein Tenger the story of an early encounter of Therese and Beethoven.  She was a pupil who felt for him that mingled love and terror he instilled in women.  One bitterly cold and stormy day he came to give the young countess her lesson; she was especially eager to please him, but grew so anxious that her playing went all askew.  He was under the obsession of one of his savageries.  He grew more and more impatient with her, and finally struck her hand from the keys, and rushed out bareheaded into the storm.

Her first horror at his brutality faded before her fear for his health.  “Without hat!  Without cloak!  Good heavens!” she cried.  Seizing them, she rushed after him—­she, the countess, pursued the music-teacher like a valet!  A servant followed her, and took the things from her hand to give to Beethoven, while she unseen returned; her mother rebuked her and ordered her to her room.  But the lessons continued, and in Therese’s diary Beethoven appeared constantly as “mon maitre,” “mon maitre cheri.”

She was doomed to a long jealousy.  She saw Beethoven fall in love with her cousin Giulietta Guicciardi.  Giulietta came to her for advice, saying that she longed to throw over Count Gallenberg for “that beautiful horrible Beethoven—­if it were not such a come-down.”  She did not condescend, as we have seen, and lived to regret it bitterly.

The idolatry of the pupil finally seized the teacher.  Beethoven came to dote upon the large heart, the pure soul, and the serene mind of Therese.  One night, as he extemporised as only he could, he sang a song of love to her.  One day he said, suddenly: 

“I have been like a foolish boy who gathered stones and did not observe the flower growing by the way.”

It was in the spring of 1806 that they became engaged.  Only her brother Franz, who revered Beethoven, was in the secret.  They dared not tell Therese’s mother, but Beethoven took up life and art with a new and thorough zest.  Of course, being Beethoven, he waxed wroth often at the delay and the secrecy.  But the sun broke through again.  For four years of his life the engagement endured.  Beethoven, it seems, at last grew furious.  He quarrelled with Franz, and in 1810 one day in a frenzy snapped the bond with Therese.  As she herself told Fraeulein Tenger, “The word that parted us was not spoken by me, but by him.  I was terribly frightened, turned deadly pale, and trembled.”

Even after this, the demon in him might have been exorcised, but Therese had grown afraid of the lightnings of his wrath, and fear outweighed love in the girl’s heart.  Sometimes she felt ashamed, in later years, of her timidity; at other times she was glad that she had not hampered his art, as any wife must have done.  But now she returned him his letters.  He destroyed them all, evidently, except the famous letter to his “immortal beloved,” which he had written in July, 1806, soon after the betrothal; and with it he kept a portrait she had given him.  As for Therese, she, too, had kept a copy of this letter, and as she told Fraeulein Tenger: