[156] "Und weil er so sei, wie er ihm erschiene." Mr. Ashton Ellis (Wagner's Prose Works, i. 341) translates this, "and because he was whate'er she deemed him," reading, perhaps rightly, "ihr" for "ihm."
[157] Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde, in G.S., iv. 295.
[158] Ibid., p. 266.
[159] Familienbriefe, p. 279.
[160] Familienbriefe, pp. 217, 218. See also Wagner's letter to Mathilde in his diary of August 21, 1858: "What you have been and are to me these six years now."
[161] Robert von Hornstein, Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner, in the Neue Freie Presse for 23rd and 24th September 1904 (written in 1884; Hornstein died in 1890). I have been unable to procure a copy of the article. My quotation is from Mr. Ashton Ellis's preface to his translation of the Wesendonck correspondence, p. lv. Hornstein adds, "he [Wagner] would turn sulky, hasty, perverse, never coarse. With one little word he might have thrust a poniard in the woman [Minna]; he never breathed it."
[162] Earlier in the month a child had been born to Mathilde. Hornstein tells us that at the christening he stood by Wagner's side. "He was very moody; all at once he muttered to himself, 'It is like attending one's own execution.'" Ellis, p. lviii.
[163] Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonck, pp. 44, 45.
[164] I do not know that Mr. Ashton Ellis is justified in assuming that "Wagner at last made his bosom friend [Liszt] a confidant and counsellor," on the basis of the letter to Liszt of [5?] November 1857 which he quotes: "Now take my hand, and take my kiss; a kiss such as you gave me a year ago, when you accompanied me home one night—you remember, after I had told my doleful tale to both of you. However much it may lose its impression on me,—what you were to me that night, the wondrous sympathy that lay in what you told me as we walked,—this heavenliness in your nature will follow with me, as my most splendid memory, to each future existence." (Op. cit., lvii.) What Mr. Ellis translates as "told my doleful tale to you both," is in the German "nachdem ich Euch bei Dir meine traurige Geschichte von Bordeaux erzählt" ("after I had told you both my mournful Bordeaux story"). Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt, ii. 181. Wagner's confidence and Liszt's sympathy were apparently as much in connection with the Laussot affair as with the other. But the words "von Bordeaux" were suppressed in the first edition of the letters.
[165] In Mein Leben Wagner tells the story of the purchase of the "Asyl" somewhat differently. There is not a word there of Wesendonck having been persuaded by his wife into buying the property for Wagner, or of the trouble in the Wesendonck household over him. See Mein Leben, p. 645.