Joseph Mirouet, gifted by nature with a delightful voice, a fine
figure, a handsome face, and being moreover a composer of great taste
and much brilliancy, led for over fifteen years the Bohemian life
which Hoffman has so well described. So, by the time he was forty, he
was reduced to such depths of poverty that he took advantage of the
events of 1806 to make himself once more a Frenchman. He settled in
Hamburg, where he married the daughter of a bourgeois, a girl devoted
to music, who fell in love with the singer (whose fame was ever
prospective) and chose to devote her life to him. But after fifteen
years of Bohemia, Joseph Mirouet was unable to bear prosperity; he was
naturally a spendthrift, and though kind to his wife, he wasted her
fortune in a very few years. The household must have dragged on a
wretched existence before Joseph Mirouet reached the point of
enlisting as a musician in a French regiment. In 1813 the
surgeon-major of the regiment, by the merest chance, heard the name of
Mirouet, was struck by it, and wrote to Doctor Minoret, to whom he was
under obligations.
The answer was not long in coming.
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