The composition was more than half written.  Trusty friends and competent judges who had heard the beginning of the work talked of it with such enthusiasm that many of Mozart’s enemies, even, were prepared to hear, within six months, that his Don Juan had taken all Germany by storm.  His more prudent and moderate friends, who took into consideration the state of the public taste, hardly expected an immediate and universal success; and with these the master himself secretly agreed.

Constanze, however, was like all women.  If once they hope, particularly in a righteous cause, they are less apt than men are to give heed to discouraging features.  She still held fast to her favorable opinion, and had, even now, new occasion to defend it.  She did so in her gay and lively fashion, the more earnestly because Mozart’s spirits had fallen decidedly in the course of the previous conversation.  She described minutely how, after their return, she should use the hundred ducats which the manager at Prague would pay for the score.  That sum would supply their most pressing needs, and they could live comfortably till spring.

“Your Herr Bondine will make some money with this opera, you may be sure; and if he is half as honest as you think him, he will give you later also a fair per cent. of the price that other theatres pay him for their copies of Don Juan.  But, even if he doesn’t, there are plenty of other good things that might happen to us; they are more probable too!”

“What, for instance?”

“A little bird told me that the King of Prussia needs a leader for his orchestra.”

“Oh!”

“A general music director, I mean.  Let me build you an air-castle!  That weakness I got from my mother.”

“Build away!  The higher the better!”

“No, my air-castles are very real ones!  In a year from now they’ll be reporting—­”

“If the Pope to Gretchen comes a-courting!”

“Keep quiet, you ridiculous goose!  I tell you by the first of next September there will be no ‘Imperial Court Composer’ of the name of Wolf Mozart to be found in Vienna.”

“May the foxes bite you for that!”

“I hear already what our old friends are saying and gossiping about us.”

“What, then?”

“Well, a little after nine o’clock one fine morning our old friend and admirer Frau Volkstett comes sailing at full speed across the Kahlmarkt.  She has been away for three months.  That famous visit to her brother-in-law in Saxony, that we have heard about every day, has at last come off.  She returned yesterday, and cannot wait any longer to see her dear friend, the Colonel’s wife.  Upstairs she goes and knocks at the door, and does not wait for an answer.  You may imagine the rejoicing and the embracing an both sides.  ’Now dearest, best Frau Colonel,’ she begins after the greetings are over, ’I have so many messages for you.  Guess from whom?  I didn’t come straight from Stendal, but by way of Brandenburg.’