BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Tuesday, December 14, 1824

Nephew Karl is at the apartment. At mid-day dinner, Karl thinks the meat with the sauce tastes like medicine. The housekeeper says there are too few plates. [The plates appear to have been broken by the housekeeper on a regular basis, since Karl will later obliquely refer to taking the cost of replacing them out of her salary.]

The maid informs them that Brother Johann’s wife Therese is here in Vienna; she sent the letter. [The letter referred to does not survive.] Karl says she is spending extravagant amounts here, and Johann must be tormented down there [in Gneixendorf] by it. Karl wouldn’t have allowed her to come to Vienna. Ludwig wouldn’t either, and Karl adds, “all the more since her father still lives here.”

Karl mentions that he saw their former maid, Maria Pamer, again today. She was buying meat at the two meat tables by the university. Ludwig asks what kind of meat she was buying. Karl says field birds. She is helping out at a baroness’s, since the cook there is sick. She says that she is always inconvenienced and other people are to blame.

She has a complaint about the shoemaker and how he obtained boot-trees, and he denied it. She thinks he wants to keep them for himself. Ludwig asks how she knows this, and Karl says she inquired in the Landstrasse.

Conversation Book 78, 35v-36v.