Good father, good sage, gallant old man!  But neither of the troubled lovers proved worthy of such golden philosophy.  Desiree’s travels took her away.  Their parting must have been cold, for in January, 1869, Tschaikovski wrote his brother a letter, excitedly referring to the acceptance of his opera, and coldly hinting that his love affair would probably come to nothing.  We remember how calmly Mozart once wrote of his operatic triumph and how passionately of his love.

The same month a telegram informed Tschaikovski that his fiancee had very suddenly become engaged to a singer in her own troupe, the Spanish baritone, Padilla y Ramos, who was two years younger even than Tschaikovski.  The singers were married at Sevres, September 15, 1869.

Tschaikovski, on receiving the first news, seemed “more surprised than pained.”  He was still flirting desperately with grand opera.  A year later he heard that Desiree was returning to sing at Moscow.  He wrote pluckily: 

“She is coming here and I cannot avoid meeting her.  The woman has cost me many a bitter hour, and yet I feel myself drawn toward her with such inexplicable sympathy, that I wait her coming with feverish impatience.”

At her performance he sat in the pit with his friend Kashkin, who says he was terribly excited, and kept his opera-glasses fastened on her always, though he must have been almost blinded by the tears that streamed down his cheeks.  The two did not meet, however, for seven years, and then unexpectedly.  He called at Nikolai Rubinstein’s office in the Conservatory; he was told to wait in the anteroom.  After a time, a lady came out.  “Tschaikovski leaped to his feet and turned white.  The woman gave a little cry of alarm, and confusedly fumbled for the door.  Finding it at last, she fled without speaking.”

In 1888 Tschaikovski went to Berlin.  There Desiree was the idol of the court and public.  They met now as friends.  He and Edvard Grieg called at her house, and he wrote in his diary: 

“This evening is counted among the most agreeable recollections of my sojourn in Berlin.  The personality and the art of this singer are as irresistibly bewitching as ever.”

Requiescat in pace!  She had taught him the pangs of disprised love, but she had escaped misery, and she seems to have lived happily ever afterward with a husband who won eminence equal to hers as a singer.  As for Tschaikovski, he had already revenged himself in kind—­in worse kind—­upon the sex, which had really attracted him only once.

In the year 1875 Tschaikovski’s nerves had gone to pieces from overwork and his mode of life.  For months he was not allowed to write down a note.  And now, I think some one must have prescribed marriage as a cure for his ills.  There followed that strange affair which was a riddle as late as the time Miss Newmarch’s biography appeared in 1900; a solution was then hoped from a sealed document left by Kashkin, and not to be opened till the year 1927.  Tschaikovski himself had looked over his own diary, and had been so terrified at what he read that he destroyed a great portion of it before his death in 1893.  In 1902, however, his brother Modeste began the publication of a very elaborate and complete biography, which partially clears the riddle.  This is what we learn from that: