Your Imperial Highness!
My condition has again become worse, and it will probably be a few days before I have recovered. I am truly inconsolable not to be able to wait upon Your Imperial Highness. Although I have already blamed myself for this indisposition, yet the weather seems to be more or less the cause of my ill health. I only hope and desire that Your Imperial Highness will not also contract the same illness. But I hope soon to be able to visit my most esteemed and eminent pupil, through whose gracious sympathy I have found relief in many sorrows and difficult circumstances which for sometime have been causing me a great deal of suffering ––
Your Imperial Highness’s
Faithful and most obedient servant,
Ludwig van Beethoven