[136] He had apparently forgotten his promise (Mein Leben, p. 177) never to mention the affair to her again; and when he said in Mein Leben, "I can pride myself on having kept this resolution to the letter," he had evidently forgotten this epistle of May 18, 1859.
[137] See p. 68.
[138] Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner, ii. 92.
[139] See pp. 55, 56. He protests that she has been misinformed; the object of his "second journey to Bordeaux" was not to "abduct a young wife from her husband." So far as it goes, that statement is correct. The object of his second journey, apparently, was merely to pacify Eugène Laussot. But he does not seem to have told Minna as much of his relations with Jessie Laussot as he has told the world in Mein Leben.
[140] No one would guess, for example, from Mein Leben how much money had been put at his disposal and how much consideration had been shown him by Napoleon III and others during the Paris Tannhäuser period.
[141] November 9, 1851; Briefe, i. 88.
[142] Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner, i. 302.
[143] Kapp, Richard Wagner und die Frauen, p. 65.
[144] Letter to Hermann Brockhaus of February 2, 1851, in Familienbriefe, p. 165.
[145] Minna objected energetically to the time he spent in writing prose instead of music. Between August 1847, when he finished Lohengrin, and the autumn of 1853 he seems to have written no music at all, though he was occupied with the text of the Ring.