It is near the close of 1770.  Helena has experienced “the pleasing punishment that women bear,” but “remembereth no more the anguish for joy that a man is born into the world.”  Her joy is the greater, because last year, in April, she buried, in less than a week after his birth, her first-born, Ludwig Maria,—­as the name still stands upon the baptismal records of the parish of St. Remigius, with the names of Kapellmeister Beethoven, and the next-door neighbor, Frau Loher, as sponsors.  This second-born is a strong, healthy child, and his baptism is recorded in the same parish-book, Dec. 17, 1770,—­the day of, possibly the day after, his birth,—­by the name of Ludwig.  The Kapellmeister is again godfather, but Frau Gertrude Mueller, nee Baum, next door on the other side, is the godmother.  The Beethovens had neither kith nor kin in Bonn; the families Ries and Salomon, their intimate friends, were Israelites; hence the appearance of the neighbors, Frauen Loher and Mueller, at the ceremony of baptism;—­a strong corroborative evidence, that No. 515, Bonngasse, was the actual birth-place of Beethoven.

The child grew apace, and in manhood his earliest and proudest recollections, save of his mother, were of the love and affection lavished upon him, the only grandchild, by the Kapellmeister.  He had just completed his third year when the old man died, and the bright sun which had shone upon his infancy, and left an ineffaceable impression upon the child’s memory, was obscured.  Johann van Beethoven had inherited his mother’s failing, and its effects were soon visible in the poverty of the family.  He left the Bonngasse for quarters in that house in the Rheingasse, near the upper steamboat-landing, which now erroneously bears the inscription, Ludwig van Beethovens Geburtshaus.

His small inheritance was soon squandered; his salary as singer was small, and at length even the portrait of his father went to the pawnbroker.  In the April succeeding the Kapellmeister’s death, the expenses of Johann’s family were increased by the birth of another son,—­Caspar Anton Carl; and to this event Dr. Wegeler attributes the unrelenting perseverance of the father in keeping little Ludwig from this time to his daily lessons upon the piano-forte.  Both Wegeler and Burgomaster Windeck of Bonn, sixty years afterward, remembered how, as boys, visiting a playmate in another house across the small court, they often “saw little Louis, his labors and sorrows.”  Cecilia Fischer, too, a playmate of Beethoven in his early childhood, and living in the same house in her old age, “still saw the little boy standing upon a low footstool and practising his father’s lessons,” in tears.