Note 66 — THIRD PERIOD. TILL HIS DEATH IN 1827. PART II.

I am so fortunate as to possess the original score of this work. Reminding Beethoven of the fate of the Kyrie in the grand Mass, and apprehensive that this score might also be used by his servants as waste paper for wrapping up boots and shoes, I asked him for it, and he gave it to me, attaching no higher value to such a gift than an ordinary sheet of paper. In the year 1823 his manuscripts fared precisely as they had done twenty years earlier, as M. Ries remarks (p. 113). All of them lay about in the utmost confusion, and any one that chose might take away what he pleased unmolested. May not this indifference towards the productions of his genius, the value of which, however, he well knew, be considered as the strongest proof that in his mind there was no trace of conceit, self-importance, or even egotism? In whom has the like ever been seen?