“Robert must transfer to me 8,000 thalers of his capital, the interest of which shall come to me, also the capital, in case of a separation—­What a hideous thought!  Robert has 12,000 thalers, and shall he give his wife two-thirds?”

Robert had already given her four hundred thalers in bonds.  The new terms being rejected, Wieck put everything possible in the way of a speedy termination of the lawsuit.  He made it impossible for Clara to get back to Paris, as she wished, to earn more money before the marriage.  He demanded that she should postpone her wedding and take a concert tour for three months with him for a consideration of six thousand thalers.  Clara declined the arrangement.

One day she sent her maid to the house of her father, and asked him for her winter cloak.  He gave this answer to the maid:  “Who then is this Mam’selle Wieck?  I know two Fraeulein Wieck only; they are my two little daughters here.  I know no other!” As Litzmann says:  “With so shrill a dissonance ended Clara’s stay at Leipzig.”  He compares this exile of the daughter by the father to the story of King Lear and Cordelia.  But it was the blind and tyrannical old Lear of the first act, driving from his home his most loving child.  On October 3d, Clara went back to Berlin to her mother.  Her father moved heaven and earth to make Clara suspect Schumann’s fidelity, and he gave the love affair as unpleasant a notoriety as possible.  For an instance of senile spite:  Clara had always been given a Behrens piano for her concerts in Berlin.  Wieck wrote to a friend to go to Behrens, and warn him that he must not lend Clara his pianos, because she was used to the hard English action, and would ruin any others!  He wrote that he hoped the honour of the King of Prussia would prevent his disobedient daughter from appearing in public concerts in Berlin.  It need hardly be said that Clara was neither forbidden her piano nor her concerts; indeed, the king appeared in person at her concert and applauded the runaway vigorously.  By a curious chance at the end of her piece de resistance, a string broke on the piano; but as a correspondent of Schumann’s paper wrote, it came “just at the end, like a cry of victory.”  After this, Wieck wrote to Behrens protesting against his lending a hand to “a demoralised girl without shame.”  Clara learned that such of her letters as had gone through the Wieck home were opened, and she received an anonymous letter which she knew must have been dictated by her father.  Her suspicions were later proved.  The worst of the affair was the diabolical malice that led Wieck to have the letter put into her hand just before her chief Berlin concert.