‘I am no more taking a side than you,’ he insisted. ‘Napoléon is feeding Haydn, but I want him to feed a hungry orchestra. He will not stay in Vienna, for the fight is no longer here. I am safe to promise him music and he will feed my musicians, simply at the thought of it. Is it true the Habsburgs left the Treasury full when they left?’

My uncle admitted that they had, and Herr van Beethoven called taking money from Napoléon for his players ‘Habsburg money for Habsburg musicians’, as if his entitlement to it was somehow automatic.

My uncle pointed out that Napoléon might not see it that way, and had already decided to levy taxes on rent contracts, despite the Habsburg money, to which Herr van Beethoven said, in an abrupt tone, ‘It’s enough that I pay the countess what I do for my rooms, and now I must pay him for them as well?’

He then again insisted that it was his orchestra at the heart of his concerns and not himself, for two of his benefactors had paid the first sums due of his annuity before leaving the city, and he would have income from his music publishers. I made no mention of my study of the score for Doctor Haydn, since I am certain Herr van Beethoven had had enough of me talking about his music by then.

Napoléon was still his focus, of course. ‘If I knew as much about military strategy as I know about counterpoint, I’d give him something to deal with,’ he said, his tone, if anything, fouler than before.

Taking this as a slight against Uncle Drew, I was unable to keep my thoughts to myself, and told Herr van Beethoven, with some force, that if the Habsburgs had raised an army of soldiers, rather than one of farmers and drunken students, I had no doubt that my great-uncle would have given the Emperor something to deal with too.

It is only now, as I write, that it occurs to me that his baffled expression in response might have been provoked by his complete lack of knowledge that FML O’Reilly was my great-uncle, as it had never been explained to him. My uncle, though, seemed well enough pleased, telling me the services of a translator had never run so broadly as they did today.

I returned to Kleine Steingasse, where Frau Meyer scrambled eggs with milk, and set about baking bread while I fed the cooked eggs to Doctor Haydn with a spoon. She baked with the shutters all closed for fear the smell of it would cause a riot. I took the last of the hard heels of old bread that we had, and which his mouth would no longer bear, and I toasted them in a dry pan and ate them myself, with a small corner of a pat of butter the Emperor had given us, and a measure of beer, feeling that I had earned all that and deciding that war is not terrible every day.