Meanwhile, he and the comtesse were drifting apart, in spite of these three hostages to fortune.  It is difficult to justify Liszt’s desertion of the woman, except by slandering her memory, and it is difficult to save her memory without slandering his.  The cause, as explained by Ramann, is, that she cherished an ambition to be Liszt’s Muse, and made strong demands for the acceptance of her opinions upon his works.  We can easily imagine the situation:  A sensitive, fiery composer, who is incidentally the chief virtuoso of the world, dashes off a gorgeous composition, and in the first warmth of enthusiasm plays it to his companion.  She, desirous of asserting her importance, listens to it with that frame of mind which makes it easy to criticise any work of art ever created—­the desire to find fault.  Benevolent and sincere as her intentions may have been, the criticisms of this shallow and musically untrained woman must have driven Liszt to desperation.

It is a rare musician that can tolerate the faintest disapproval of even his poorest work, and frequently a critic lauds to the skies all of the composer’s works except one or two, and then, in order to give his eulogy an appearance of discrimination and remove the taste of unadulterated gush, inserts a mild implication that this one or these two compositions are not the greatest works in existence—­that unhappy critic is practically sure to find that his eulogy has been accepted as a mere matter of course, and his criticism bitterly resented as a gratuitous and unwarranted assault upon beautiful creations which his small skull and hickory-nut heart are unable to grasp.

Liszt was never especially philosophical under fault-finding, and to have a fireside critic after him, nagging him day and night, must have soured all the milk of human kindness in his heart.  The comtesse was stubborn in her views, and her artistic conferences with Liszt degenerated into violent brawls.  The young French poet, De Rocheaud, “assisted,” as the French say, at one of these combats between an hysterical woman and a thin-skinned musician.  The poet believed in Muses and such things, using as an argument that beautiful fable which Dante built on the most slender foundations.

“Think of Dante and Beatrice,” exclaimed De Rocheaud.  “Think how the divine poet listened to her words as to revelations.  Be thou Dante, and she Beatrice.”  “Bah, Dante! bah, Beatrice!” cried Liszt, “the Dantes create the Beatrices.  The genuine die when they are eighteen years old.”

At length the gipsy spirit moved Liszt to make a long continental tour to complete the depletions in his purse.  He did not care to take the comtesse and the children with him.  With much difficulty he persuaded her to go to Paris and live with his mother, since she was on bad terms with her own family.  Later he succeeded in reconciling the comtesse with these, also.  After the death of her mother, the comtesse inherited a fortune, but Liszt continued to support the children.