[98] Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt, i. 48.
[99] It will be remembered that he proposed to divide between Minna and himself the annuity of 3000 francs he was to receive from Frau Ritter and Mrs. Taylor. We can hardly imagine Wagner maintaining life on £60 per annum, even in Greece or Asia Minor; and he could hardly expect that Mrs. Taylor would continue the annuity after he had eloped with her married daughter.
[100] Letter of July 2, 1850, Briefwechsel, i. 49.
[101] Her father, by the way, was an English lawyer. But as he had been in the grave for some time he could hardly be said, with a strict regard for truth, to be interested in Wagner's music, and to be advancing money on phantom assignments of the copyright of unwritten works.
[102] The people in whose private affairs he was thus confidently meddling were, on his own showing, "utter strangers," to him a few weeks before this. It would be interesting to have Laussot's opinion of him!
[103] According to his own account, which makes some demands on our credulity, he simply "rang the bell and the door sprang open: without meeting anyone I entered the open first floor, passed from room to room," &c. Julius Kapp cynically suggests that he must have been wearing the Tarnhelm.
[104] Mein Leben, p. 528.
[105] Letter of May 30, 1859: Richard an Minna Wagner, ii. 95.
[106] The Laussot story as told in Mein Leben is another instance of the damage Wagner has done his own case by voluntarily going into the witness box to give evidence on his own behalf. The older biographers apparently know nothing of the Laussot affair. There is not a word of it even in the latest Glasenapp biography, though it is hard to believe that Glasenapp had never heard of it. (His work as a whole, with its copiousness and its general accuracy as to facts, suggests access to Mein Leben before publication of the latter.) Reading his account of the Paris-Zürich excursion of 1850, indeed, in the light of our present knowledge, it is hard to resist the conclusion that he knows more than he is telling.
It is interesting to recall the fact that Ferdinand Praeger, whose Wagner as I Knew Him is anathema to the Wagnerians—and to some extent rightly so—has a story that is evidently a muddled version of the Laussot affair. "At Bordeaux," says Praeger, "an episode occurred similar to one which happened later at Zürich [Frau Wesendonck?], about which the press of the day made a good deal of unnecessary commotion and ungenerous comment. I mention the incident to show the man as he was. The opposition have not spared his failings, and over the Zürich incident were hypercritically censorious. The Bordeaux story I am alluding to is, that the wife of a friend, Mrs. H——, having followed Wagner to the south, called on him at his hotel, and throwing herself at his feet, passionately told of her affection. Wagner's action in the matter was to telegraph to the husband to come and take his wife home. On telling me the story, Wagner jocosely remarked that poor Beethoven, so full of love, never had his affection returned, and lived and died, so it is said, a hermit" (p. 196).