us all a great deal of good. Being, however, very short, and
having no very great gift for acting, the scope of her powers was
very limited, and as she was soon surpassed by more successful
competitors, it was a real stroke of good luck for her that a
young officer in the Russian army, then Captain, now General,
Carl von Meek, fell head over ears in love with the simple girl,
and married her a year later. The unfortunate part of this
engagement, however, was that it caused many difficulties, and
brought the first cloud over our menage a trois. For, after a
while, the two sisters quarrelled bitterly, and I had the very
unpleasant experience of living for a whole year in the same
house with two relatives who neither saw nor spoke to each other.

We spent the winter at the beginning of 1838 in a very small
dingy dwelling in the old town; it was not till the spring that
we moved into a pleasanter house in the more salubrious
Petersburg suburb, where, in spite of the sisterly breach before
referred to, we led a fairly bright and cheerful life, as we were
often able to entertain many of our friends and acquaintances in
a simple though pleasant fashion. In addition to members of the
stage I knew a few people in the town, and we received and
visited the family of Dorn, the musical director, with whom I
became quite intimate. But it was the second musical director,
Franz Lobmann, a very worthy though not a very gifted man, who
became most faithfully attached to me. However, I did not
cultivate many acquaintances in wider circles, and they grew
fewer as the ruling passion of my life grew steadily stronger; so
that when, later on, I left Riga, after spending nearly two years
there, I departed almost as a stranger, and with as much
indifference as I had left Magdeburg and Konigsberg. What,