“I have read it so often that I know it by heart—­like a poem—­and was it not a beautiful poem?  I can only humbly say to myself, ’That man loved thee,’ and thank God for it.”

She also showed a sheet of old paper, with a spray of immortelles, and on it an inscription from Ludwig: 

“L’immortelle a son Immortelle.  LUIGI.”

These immortelles she sewed into a white silk cushion, with a request that it be placed under her head in her coffin.

When Fraeulein Tenger had first met the countess as a child she had been asked to go every year on March 27th and lay a wreath of immortelles on Beethoven’s grave.  The acquaintance continued, and they met again at long intervals till the countess’s death in 1861.  Fraulein Tenger wrote her book in her old age when she had lost her diaries, but enough of her reminiscences remain to prove Thayer’s ingenious guesses correct.

Therese von Brunswick was Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved,” and the picture found with the letter was her portrait.  It was painted by Lampi, when Therese was about twenty-eight; and on the frame can be seen still the words: 

“To the rare genius, to the great artist, to the good man, from

T.B.”

The picture is in the Beethoven Museum at Bonn, and in the National Museum at Pesth is a bust of Therese in her later years, erected in her honour because she organised out of her charity the first infants’ school in the Austrian empire, and did many other good works.  It is both pity and solace that the noble woman did not wed Beethoven.  She was his muse for years.  That was, as she said, something to thank God for.  She was also a beautiful spiritual influence on him.

Once the Baron Spaun found Beethoven kissing Therese’s portrait and muttering:  “Thou wast too noble—­too like an angel.”  The baron withdrew silently, and returning later found Beethoven extemporising in heavenly mood.  He explained:  “My good angel has appeared to me.”

In 1813 he wrote in his diary: 

“What a fearful state to be in, not to be able to trample down all my longings for the joys of a home, to be always revelling in these longings.  O God!  O God! look down in mercy upon poor, unhappy Beethoven, and put an end to this soon; let it not last much longer!”

And so Beethoven never married.  The women, indeed, whom he loved, whom he proposed to, always awoke with a shock to the risk of joining for life a man of such explosive whims, of such absorption in his own self and art, of such utter deafness, untidiness, and morose habit of mind.

But Beethoven himself was not always eager to wed.  He could write to Gleichenstein: 

“Now you can help me get a wife.  If you find a pretty one—­one who may perhaps lend a sigh to my harmonies, do the courting for me.  But she must be beautiful; I cannot love anything that is not beautiful; if I could, I should fall in love with myself.”