giving her further lessons, which she would never pay for.  The story seems to be, however, neither true nor well-found, for in spite of his awkwardness and the hard life he led at the hands of his teacher Clementi, who made him serve as a combined salesman of pianos and a concert virtuoso, he was said to have married a Russian lady of rank and wealth.  She was really a Frenchwoman named Charpentier whom he had met in Moscow.  She was a professional pianist, and bore him a son; then she left him, and changed her name, as did even the son.  He was one of the many composers who should have been kept in a cage.

CLEMENTI, HUMMEL, STEIBELT

As for Clementi, he was chiefly notable for his miserly qualities, by which he rendered miserable three successive wives.

The pianist Hummel, whom I always place with Clementi in a sort of musical Dunciad, is credited with having won a courtship duel against Beethoven, in which Clementi as the winner—­or was it the loser?—­married the woman.

Another rival of Beethoven’s in public esteem was Daniel Steibelt, forgotten as a virtuoso, but not to be forgotten for his splendid vices which range from kleptomania up, or down as you wish.  He married a young and beautiful woman, who doubtless deserved her fate, since we are told that she was a wonderful performer on the tambourine.  He succeeded to the post of Boieldieu, the eminent opera composer, who began life under poor matrimonial auspices, seeing that his mother was a milliner, from whom his father managed to escape by means of an easy divorce law issued by the French Revolutionists.

BOIELDIEU AND GRETRY

The father married again, but with what success, I do not know.  But at any rate, his son followed his example and married Clotilde Mafleuray, a dancer, who made him as unhappy as possible.  It was said that he was so wretched that he took to flight secretly; but it is known that his departure was mentioned in a theatrical journal in good season.  None the less, though the flight may not have been surreptitious, it may well be credited to domestic misery.  He buried himself in Russia for eight years, which may be placed in music’s column of loss.  Returning to Paris then, he found a clear field for the great success that followed.  Soon after, in 1811, he formed an attachment with a woman who bore him a son in 1816.  Her tenderness to the composer is highly praised; she must have given him devotion indeed, for he married her in 1827, eleven years after the birth of their son, who became also a worthy composer.  At the age of fifty-four, consumption and the bankruptcy of the Opera Comique, and the expulsion of the king who had pensioned him, broke down his health.  He lived five years longer.

All I know of the domestic affairs of the great French opera-writer Gretry is that he left three daughters, one of whom, Lucille, had a one-act opera successfully produced when she was only thirteen years old, and who was precocious enough to make an unhappy marriage and end it in death by the time she was twenty-three.