Here is perhaps the secret of much of his correspondence; the pure delight of letting his “fingers chase the pen, and the pen chase the ink.”  The aroma of the ink-bottle has run away with how many brains.

He wants to send her “perfect bales of letters,” he prefers to write her at the piano, especially in the chords of the ninth and the thirteenth.  He paints her a pleasant portrait of herself in a letter which, he says, is written like a little sonata, “namely, a chattering part, a laughing part, and a talking part.”

Clara seemed from his first sight of her to exercise over him a curious mingling of profound admiration and of teasing amusement.  He portrays her vividly to herself in such words as these: 

“Your letter was yourself all over.  You stood before me laughing and talking; rushing from fun to earnest as usual, diplomatically playing with your veil.  In short, the letter was Clara herself, her double.”

All these expressions of tenderness and fascinations were ground enough for the child Clara to build Spanish hopes upon, but in the very same letter Schumann could refer to that torment of Clara’s soul, Ernestine, and speak of her as “your old companion in joy and sorrow, that bright star which we can never appreciate enough.”

A change, however, seems to have come over Ernestine.  Clara found her taciturn and mistrustful, and when the Baron von Fricken came for her, Wieck himself wrote in the diary, “We have not missed her; for the last six weeks she has been a stranger in our house; she had lost completely her lovable and frank disposition.”  He compares her to a plant, which only prospers under attention, but withers and dies when left to itself.  He concludes, “The sun shone too sharply upon her, i.e., Herr Schumann.”

But the sun seemed to withdraw from the flower it had scorched.  During her absence, Ernestine wrote to Schumann many letters, chiefly remarkable for their poor style and their worse grammar.  To a man of the exquisite sensibility of Schumann, and one who took literature so earnestly, this must have been a constant torture.  It humiliated his own love, and greatly undermined the romance, which crumpled absolutely when he learned that she was not the baron’s own daughter, but only an adopted child, and of an illegitimate birth at that.  He had not learned these facts from her; indeed she had practised elaborate deceptions upon him.  But the breaking of the engagement—­a step almost as serious as divorce in the Germany of that day—­he seems to have conducted with his characteristic gentleness and tact; for Ernestine did not cease to be his friend and Clara’s.  Later, when he was accused of having severed the ties with Ernestine, he wrote: 

“You say something harsh, when you say that I broke the engagement with Ernestine.  That is not true; it was ended in proper form with both sides agreeing.  But concerning this whole black page of my life, I might tell you a deep secret of a heavy psychic disturbance that had befallen me earlier.  It would take a long time, however, and it includes the years from the summer of 1833 on.  But you shall learn of it sometime, and you will have the key to all my actions and my peculiar manner.”