owever, was a much more romantic
affair than a railway trip would have been. In the first place, it was a
real flight--from his creditors whom he had to evade. Next he had to
dodge the Russian sentries, whose boxes were placed on the boundary line
only a thousand yards apart. A friend discovered a way of accomplishing
this feat, and Wagner presently found himself on the ship, with his
wife and his enormous Newfoundland dog. In his trunk he had what he
hoped would help him to begin a brilliant career in Paris: one opera
completed,--"The Novice of Palermo;" two acts of another,--"Rienzi;" and
in his head he had the plot and some of the musical themes for a
third,--"The Flying Dutchman."

The sea voyage came just in time to give him local color for this weird
nautical opera. Three times the vessel was tossed by violent storms, and
once the captain was obliged to seek safety in a Norwegian harbor. The
sailors told Wagner their version of the "Flying Dutchman" legend, and
altogether these adventures were the very thing he wanted at the time,
and aided him in making his opera realistic, both in its text and its
music, which imitates the howling of the storm winds and "smells of the
salt breezes."

So for once our young musician had a streak of luck. But it did not last
long. He found Paris a very large city, and with very little use for
him. He made the most diverse efforts to support himself, nearly always
without success. Once it seemed as if his hopes were to be fulfilled.
The Theatre de la Renaissance accepted his "Novice of Palermo;" but at
the last moment there was the usual bankruptcy of the management,--the
fourth that affected him! Then he wrote a Parisian Vaudeville, but it
had to be given up because the actors declared it could not be executed.
The Grand Opera, on which he had fixed his eye, was absolutely out of
the question. He was brought to such straits that he offered to sing in
the chorus of a small Boulevard theatre, but was rejected. His wife
pawned her jewels; on several occasions it is said that she even went
into the street to beg a few pennies for their supper. It was doubtless
during these years of starvation that Wagner acquired those gastric
troubles which in later years often prevented him from working more than
an hour or two a day.

A few German friends occasionally gave a little pecuniary aid, but the
only regular source of income was musical hackwork for the publisher
Schlesinger, who gladly