"Königreich Bayern!" How happy we were to be in the domain of King Charming! We thought and spoke only of him.
This same route, by which we were coming, he once travelled in the opposite direction, alone and in secret, in order to go and surprise the Master at Tribschen and, "to experience again during a few wonderful hours the joy of being with him."
Wagner had told us the story of this journey of the King.
"It was the 22nd of May, 1866, on the fifty-third anniversary of my birth. Early in the morning the king had started out alone from the castle of Starnberg, riding his horse to Biesenhofen where he had taken the train to Lindau; there he disembarked, and to my profound astonishment, arrived that same afternoon at Tribschen. They set up a camp-bed for him in my study. He begged me to return with him to Bavaria, but, for his own sake, I felt that I must refuse.
"In the following year, Ludwig II. was affianced to his cousin, the Archduchess Sophie, sister to the Empress of Austria, and, in order to add to the significance of the marriage ceremonies, fixed for the 12th October, they reserved for this date the first representation of "Die Meistersinger." But, before that time arrived, one evening when "Tristan" was being given at the Royal Theatre, the prospective bride appeared in a box in an unceremonious toilet; she listened to the work with an absent air, and without attempting to disguise the fact that she was bored. She was not Wagnerian in her tastes! The discovery abruptly broke the spell: the King judged that a person who shared so little in his faith and his enthusiasm ought not to be his wife, and he closed his heart against her.
"We admired him for that, and Villiers declared that if he understood German better he would compose a poem in which he would say magnificent things, and would send it to Ludwig II."
This idea led us back to the dedication printed at the beginning of the score of "Die Walküre," those well-known stanzas that Wagner addressed "To the royal friend," consecrating him in this way to an ever glorious immortality.
The verses are reputed to be untranslatable into French, and that fact naturally incited us to make the attempt. One of our number was thoroughly conversant with the language of Goethe, and for some time back we had been working at the translation. What a good chance to go on with it, during these hours of the journey!
In the original, Wagner's poem is very beautiful, with an unusual grace and exquisite subtlety of expression.
What would it be in French?