[175] Ibid., ii. 188. This passage was suppressed in the previous editions of the Wagner-Liszt letters.
[176] Letter of 24 (?) January 1858, ii. 188 ff. That matters at Zürich had been on the verge of a crisis we may guess from a sentence in a previous letter (18-20 (?) January); in which Wagner speaks of it being necessary for him to go away in order to "give some appeasement to the sufferings of the good-natured man [Otto Wesendonck]," and that this being done he will return in a few weeks. All this, again, and more, was suppressed in the first issue of the correspondence. Truly the way of Wahnfried passeth understanding.
[177] Kapp, Richard Wagner und die Frauen, p. 123.
[178] I have ventured, here and elsewhere, to improve upon Minna's rather illiterate system of punctuation.
[179] "Mit seiner vortrefflichen Suade."
[180] Kapp, pp. 124, 125. Mr. Ellis wrongly conjectures the intercepted note to be the one quoted as No. 36 in the German edition of the Wagner-Wesendonck correspondence (No. 49 in the English edition).
[181] See the quotation on p. 86.
[182] In Mr. Ellis's translation of the letter (preface to the English edition of the Wagner-Wesendonck correspondence, p. ix.), this sentence is followed by "get well first, and let us have another talk then." I cannot find this sentence in the German edition of the Familienbriefe, p. 219.
[183] Familienbriefe, pp. 218 ff.
[184] Kapp, op. cit., p. 102. The remainder of the letter shows that while Frau Herwegh had a good opinion of Minna, she was not blindly prejudiced in her favour; and she was quite conscious that intellectually Minna was unfitted to keep pace with her husband's development. Her testimony to the excellency of Minna's heart and the hardness of her lot with Wagner is therefore all the more valuable. Wagner, it is hardly necessary to say, did not like Frau Herwegh.