One rainy night, Schumann stood a half-hour before her house and heard her play.  And he wrote her:  “Did you not feel that I was there?” He could even see his ring glitter on her finger.  Another day Clara saw him taking his coffee with his sister-in-law, and she repeated his query:  “Did you not feel that I was there?”

Old Wieck stooped to everything, and even told Clara that he had written to Ernestine to demand a statement that she fully released Schumann from his former engagement to her—­it being remembered that among Germans a betrothal always used to be almost as difficult a bond to sever as a marriage tie.  This drove Clara to resolve a great resolve, and she wrote Schumann: 

“Twice has my father in his letters underlined the words:  ’Never will I give my consent.’  What I had feared has come true.  I must act without my father’s consent and without my father’s blessing.”

An elopement was seriously considered.  It was planned that Clara was to go to Schumann’s sister-in-law.  At this time also another friend offered Schumann one thousand thalers (about $760) and he said:  “Ask of me what you will, I will do everything for you and Clara.”  But this crisis did not arrive, though the two were kept under espionage.  Even now in November, 1838, a new and merely nagging attempt was made to postpone the marriage till the latter part of 1840, but Clara wrote that she would be with Robert on Easter, 1840, without fail.  Then he went to Vienna to establish his journal there, and from there he sent a bundle of thirty short poems written in her praise.  While he was in Vienna, her father shipped her off to Paris, so sure now of cleaving their hearts asunder that he sent her alone without even an elderly woman for a companion.  He little knew that he was putting her to the test she had never yet undergone:  that of living far from him and depending solely upon herself.  It is a curious coincidence that one of her best friends in Paris was the same American girl, Emily List, who had once been Ernestine’s rival for Robert’s heart.

The French people did not please Clara and she feared to go on to London alone.  She dreamed only of hurrying back to Leipzig and Schumann and a home with him; in her letters the famous pianist seriously discusses learning to cook.

Unhappy as she was in Paris, Robert was unhappier in Vienna, for the Zeitschrift made no success, and he was driven to the bitter humiliation of taking it back to Leipzig in 1839.  His brother died at this time also, and their sympathies had been so close that the shock was very heavy.  Everything seemed to be going wrong.  He could not even find consolation in his music.  At this gloomy moment Clara hoped to win over her father by a last concession.  She wrote from Paris that it would be well to postpone the marriage a few months longer than they had first intended, and Emily List wrote a long letter advocating the same and explaining how much it grieved Clara