h via Jena and Coburg. It should be
put on record that in the meantime he ran the risk of being captured
by lingering to have a last hour with his wife. Towards the end of the
month he reached Zurich, and had no more fear of the Prussian police.

We have already seen how sick he had grown of Dresden, where he
complained of being slowly stifled; but Liszt proposed--nay,
insisted--on something worse than Dresden--Paris. Wagner was now a
penniless, homeless wanderer, as he had been when he set out from Riga
ten years before; and Liszt fondly believed that only by making a hit
in Paris could he command any enduring success in Germany, and thus
gain money to live on, wherever he might happen to be. Liszt was the
good genie who found the funds, and Wagner, having nothing better to
propose, was bound to obey. So he stayed three days in Zurich and set
out; and a deal of good he did! He knew absolutely that such work as
his could scarcely hope to get so much as a bare hearing, and the
event proved him to be right. He submitted scenarios of several operas
to a French poet, and there, for all practical purposes, the business
ended. Here is a fragment from a letter to Theodor Uhlig, dated
Zurich, August 9, '49--

"I am living here, helped in communistic fashion by Liszt, in
good spirits, and I may say prosperously, according to my best
nature; my only and great anxiety is about my poor wife, whom I
am expecting here very shortly. To my very great astonishment, I
find that I am a celebrity here; made so, indeed, by means of
the piano scores of all my operas, out of which whole acts are
repeatedly performed at concerts and at choral unions. At the
beginning of the winter I shall go again to Paris to have
something performed and to put my opera matter into order. You
cannot imagine what joy one finds in frugality if one knows that
thereby the noblest thing, freedom, is assured; you know how
long I was brewing in my blood the Dresden catastrophe, only I
had no presentiment of the exact hurricane which would drive me
thence; but you are thoroughly convinced that all the annuities
and restitutions in the world would not induce me to become
again what, to my greatest sorrow, I was in Dresden. I have just
a last remnant of curiosity, however, and you would give me much
pleasure in letting me know how matters stand with you. My wife
has never found leisure to give