tenderly devoted to her, was a young lieutenant in the Royal Guards, and the son of Muller, the ex-Minister of Education; her new choice, whose acquaintance she had formed on a recent visit to Berlin, was Herr von Munchhausen.  He was a tall, slim young man, and her predilection for him was easily explained when I became more closely acquainted with her love affairs.  It seemed to me that the bestowal of her confidence on me in this matter arose from her guilty conscience; she was aware that Muller, whom I liked on account of his excellent disposition, had loved her with the earnestness of a first love, and also that she was now betraying him in the most faithless way on a trivial pretext.  She must have known that her new lover was entirely unworthy of her, and that his intentions were frivolous and selfish.  She knew, too, that no one, and certainly none of her older friends who knew her best, would approve of her behaviour.  She told me candidly that she had felt impelled to confide in me because I was a genius, and would understand the demands of her temperament.  I hardly knew what to think.  I was repelled alike by her passion and the circumstances attending it; but to my astonishment I had to confess that the infatuation, so repulsive to me, held this strange woman in so powerful a grasp that I could not refuse her a certain amount of pity, nay, even real sympathy.

She was pale and distraught, ate hardly anything, and her faculties were subjected to a strain so extraordinary that I thought she would not escape a serious, perhaps a fatal illness.  Sleep had long since deserted her, and whenever I brought her my unlucky Fliegender Hollander, her looks so alarmed me that the proposed rehearsal was the last thing I thought of.  But in this matter she insisted; she made me sit down at the piano, and then plunged into the study of her role as if it were a matter of life and death.  She found the actual learning of the part very difficult, and it was only by repeated and persevering rehearsal that she mastered her task.  She would sing for hours at a time with such passion that I often sprang up in terror and begged her to spare herself; then she would point smiling to her chest, and expand the muscles of her still magnificent person, to assure me that she was doing herself no harm.  Her voice really acquired at that time a youthful freshness and power of endurance.  I had to confess that which often astonished me:  this infatuation for an insipid nobody was very much to the advantage of my Senta.  Her courage under this intense strain was so great that, as time pressed, she consented to have the general rehearsal on the very day of the first performance, and a delay which would have been greatly to my disadvantage was thus avoided.