Then the lawsuit began.  On the 16th of July he made his appeal and wrote to Clara that she must be personally present in six or seven weeks.  She had written him a letter of great cheer and sent him from Paris a portrait she had had painted and a cigar case she had made with her own hands.

On her way home Clara stopped at Berlin, where her own mother lived as the wife of Bargiel.

Clara’s life under her father’s guardianship had gradually drifted almost out of the ken of her own mother.  Her stepmother had done everything possible to make her life miserable, spying upon her and making it impossible to be alone long enough to write Schumann a letter.  Now, in her loneliness, Clara turned to the woman whose flesh she was; and she found there an immediate and passionate support.

From Wieck and the Wieck family, Clara had received while in Paris not one penny of money and not a single trinket.  They always wrote her:  “You have your own money.”  This grieved her deeply, and her father’s sending her to Paris without a chaperon of any kind and writing her never a word of tenderness but only and always reproaches, had orphaned her indeed.  Her heart was doubly ripe for a little mothering, and Frau Bargiel seized the moment.  She wrote letters of greatest warmth and sweetness to her child in Paris, and to Schumann she wrote an invitation to come to Berlin.  He accepted and spent several pleasant days.  Frau Bargiel wrote Clara how she had delighted in the talent and person of Schumann, and Robert wrote her how fine a mother she had.  On the 14th of August, Clara and her friend Henrietta Reissman left Paris.

Meanwhile Schumann had sunk into another awesome abyss of melancholia.  The humiliation of having to go to law for his wife, and airing the family scandal in public, crushed him to the dust.  He wrote his friend Becker:  “I hardly think I shall live to hear the decision of the court.”  As soon as Clara left Paris he hastened toward her and met her at Altenburg.  It was a blissful reunion after a year of separation, and they went together to Berlin, where they knew the bliss of sitting once more at the piano together, playing Bach fugues.  She found his genius still what it was,—­“er fantasiert himmlisch”—­but his health was in such serious condition that she was greatly frightened.

Now her father proceeded to destroy every claim he may ever have had on her sympathy by his ferocity toward a daughter who had been so patient and so gentle toward him.  He not only neglected her in Paris, except to write her merciless letters, but when she returned and he saw himself confronted with the lawsuit for her liberty, he offered a revision of his terms, which was in itself worse than the original.  Clara describes the new offer: 

“I must surrender the 2,000 thalers (about $1,500) which I have saved from seven years’ concerts, and give it to my brothers.

“He would give back my effects and instruments, but I must later pay 1,000 thalers and give this also to my brothers.