proceeded at once to make a thorough fool of himself--as I have said,
for the only time in his life. He was friendly with the family of a
wig-maker named Keller, and gave lessons to his two daughters. He fell
in love with the younger. That might have been well enough. But the girl
elected to become a nun, and Haydn, either of his free and particularly
asinine will, or through persuasion, married the elder, Anne Marie, on
November 26, 1760. He was fully aware that his master, Count Morzin,
would keep no married man in his employ, so that his act was doubly
foolish. However, as it happened, that did not so much matter. Morzin
had to rid himself of such an expensive encumbrance as an orchestra,
and, marriage or no marriage, Haydn would have found himself without a
post. He quickly got another position, so that one bad consequence of
hasty marriage did not count. The other consequence remained--he still
had a wife. She was, from all accounts, a demon of a wife. He had to
separate from her, and long afterwards she wrote to him asking him to
buy her a certain house which would suit her admirably as soon as he was
good enough to leave her a happy widow. It is satisfactory to know that
Haydn bought the house for himself, and lived in it, and that the lady
died before him, though only eight years.

He had borne privation, hunger, cold, wet beds to sleep in, with the
inveterate cheeriness that never left him. He worked on steadily until
his old age in the service he now entered--that of Prince Anton
Esterhazy. Until the year 1791, when he adventured far away for the
first time to come to London, his outward life was as regular and
uneventful as that of a steady Somerset House clerk. There is next to
nothing to record, and I will spare the patient reader the usual stock
of fabulous anecdotes, the product of hearsay and loose imaginations.
Let us turn for a moment to what he had learnt and actually achieved
during the first thirty years of his life.