Clara Wieck As soon as the carriage had deposited Clara and her father at the door in the old Grimmaischestrasse, she went to her room to wash her face and change her clothes and then made her way down from the top of the house to say hello to her brothers and her stepmother. But before she could find them, she heard her father through the parlor door complaining about the piano in Magdeburg and the food in Halberstadt and the Jews in Schönebeck and the leaking chamber pot in Hanover and the men in Brunswick who had tried to seduce his daughter. She planned to wait for him to finish his tirade, a regular occurrence upon his return to Leipzig, which he never loved so much as when he had forgotten what he hated about it. But in the midst of his recitation, she heard him interrupted with a single word, and not by his wife, who would never dare deny him the satisfaction of letting her know what discomforts he had experienced in order to accompany his daughter while she earned the money that would provide him in old age the luxuries he was forced to sacrifice on her behalf right now, when he would most have enjoyed them.
