Austria to call on her, he sent back word that he would be busy all that day, but would endeavor to call on the following day.  There is no record of his having gone at all.  His unjustifiable conduct toward the Imperial family, while at Toeplitz with Goethe, has been touched on in a previous chapter.  Frimmel states that something similar occurred at Baden, but does not give his authority.  Beethoven arraigned the Judiciary, even when writing conciliatory letters to the judges.  In his letters to the different magistrates during the litigation over his nephew, he is often satirical and sarcastic in spite of himself.  His criticisms of other judges, his references to the manner in which justice is administered in Austria, illustrate his temerity and independence.  His scorn of the King of Saxony, on account of being dilatory in paying the subscription for the Grand Mass, was pronounced.  He alludes to him as “the poor Dresdener” in his letters, and he even went so far as to talk about suing him when the payment was still longer withheld.[F] All this from a man who at times did not have a decent coat to wear, or a second pair of shoes; who sometimes accepted advances from his housekeeper for the necessaries of life.  His life was so simple and circumscribed that he never saw the ocean, or a snow-covered mountain, although living within sight of the foothills of the Alps.  He never returned to his native city though living not a great distance from it.

[F] Kalischer. Neue Beethovenbriefe.  Berlin, 1902.

The immediate cause of death, as demonstrated by the post-mortem held the day after his decease, was cirrhosis of the liver, the dropsy, of which Schindler makes such frequent mention, being an outcome of, and connected with, the liver trouble.  The organ showed every indication of chronic disease.  It was greatly shrunken, its very texture being changed into a hard substance.  That alcoholism is the commonest cause of cirrhosis is well known, but in Beethoven’s case some other cause for the disease must be found.  He was in the habit of taking wine with his meals, a practice so common in Vienna at that time that not to have done so would have been regarded as an eccentricity, but he never indulged in it to excess, except possibly on a few occasions when in the company of Holz.  It can hardly be brought about by the use of wines, but is produced by the inordinate use of spirituous liquors, something for which Beethoven did not care.  Cirrhosis was probably the cause of his father’s death, as he was a confirmed inebriate; but this cannot be connected with the cirrhosis of the son; the disease is not transmissible.