My poor, dear Wife!
Karl arrived here only last night and brought me your letter. After reading it I need not tell you that I'm coming back to you in any case and within the next few days. I only add the assurance that in the beginning of May, when I learned in Geneva of your trip to Paris and your efforts to locate me, I would have come out of hiding and given you the chance to talk to me, if just at that time—and just at that particular time—I did not have to consider another person, which made it absolutely impossible for me to act as openly and as much in accord with the dictates of my deeply grieving heart as I myself would have wished. Since I now had to assume definitely from various indications that you had received an extremely distorted report about what recently happened, there was nothing I wanted more to do than to enlighten you about the true course of events, less for the sake of my own personal justification than to remove the deep insult and affront which that dreadfully false report must have caused you. In order to get exact information about this, I sent Karl to Zürich. I now see from your letter that my fears were well founded, that you absolutely believe the most stupid distortions of the truth on the part of a mother who is only concerned about outward appearances, and by a vengeful and cowardly husband; that you therefore condemn me summarily as guilty—and nevertheless you want nothing more ardently than my return to you, because—separated from me—you think you would have only death to look forward to. But even though I realize that you are greatly in error, not only about this, but also about me in general, I also see that your love for me is stronger and more powerful than all your errors—and this single fact is sufficient to remove all doubts about what I have to do now. I never said that I no longer love you—and now I know that I have only to come back to you. But, my dear Minna, you are too greatly mistaken about everything that happened as well as about our mutual relationship in general for me to wait for a word-of-mouth discussion to enlighten you about it. Such discussions could only be of the most repulsive kind, and would probably so involve all sorts of passions that I feel obliged to do everything in my power to obviate them. That's why I'm writing you once more in advance and asking you to consider calmly what I am going to tell you.
First of all, you are wrong when you link my decisive last letter from Paris to happenings in that family which did not actually influence my actions until after this letter. I hear that you base your mistake on a disparity between the contents of my last letter from Bordeaux and this last Paris letter, a disparity which seems very great to you. You don't understand this clearly. Listen, once more. After I did everything to make you understand my views on life and art, especially with my disgust for Paris; after I persuaded that young woman—purely to calm you—to write to you as she did; after you expressed yourself as pleased with this letter, and after you had actually copied the answer which I had drawn up for you—according to your point of view, as I thought—and sent it to her, I believed the deep disharmony of life between us had been resolved, and I looked forward to a happier future at your side and expressed this feeling and this hope to you in my first letter from Bordeaux. My shock and pain were indescribable when I received your first letter to Bordeaux and had to realize that you were standing on absolutely the same old ground; that the messages of that woman had made no lasting impression on you whatsoever; that you had copied that reply but had not really felt it; that you persisted more than ever in your error about me—about my aspirations in life and art. Then the hope of converting you failed me. I wrote you my next reply immediately upon receiving your letter, in the first excitement. You will find in it no decision as yet, but only my desperation about you. Read it once more attentively, and my state of mind must become clear to you. This day my good humor, which I had only just recaptured, had vanished; my nervous ailment has come back again. People like the mother and the husband, who, as I soon found out, understood me only very superficially, failed, of course, to notice my increasingly deep melancholy: such philistines only see the fantastic, the half-crazy, or perhaps only high-strung, artist in a person like me: but my mood did not escape my young friend who understood me and even realized that I was unhappy—as I indeed was. No declarations and understanding took place between us; she knew and learned from me that I really loved you, and for that reason was just as unhappy that we have not been able to understand each other. I now insisted on going away, I couldn't stand it any longer. I left with the intention of staying in Paris one or two days only in order to go right to Zürich. I arrived in Paris in bad shape; the old nervous condition had taken hold of me again. I began to be increasingly afraid of the journey to Zürich. I continued to expect each day a letter from you in Paris—if only for the sake of the commissions—I hoped that it would put me at rest about your attitude after that letter from me! In vain—no letter came, and I was compelled to believe that you were stubbornly persisting in your attitude. If I were now to return to Zürich, I foresaw that we should soon have the most disagreeable scenes: the mere thought that you would receive me as you have unfortunately done so often before, coldly and reproachfully, was terrible to me! I foresaw that—in my present state of mind—I would take hat and stick after one of those scenes and never return; how often already have I gone off alone in such an awful state of mind! Influenced by these thoughts and considerations, I decided to write to you—and not to go back to Zürich at all! Those who were around me at the time know how pitiful my condition was! I read your letters from Zürich once more, and among those few I found two in which you threatened to leave me—just as you told me as soon as you arrived in Switzerland that if ever I did not behave well you merely had to write in order to receive traveling money for your return! Really, Minna, it was your fault that I began to get used to the idea of a separation!! Believe absolutely what I'm telling you here, then you'll understand that letter which seemed so terrible to you, and you will not have to look for any other motives. What drove me to this step was something which concerned you and me alone, and absolutely no third person—even though, to be truthful, I will in no way deny that my acquaintance with that third person and the knowledge that I really could be understood without inspiring horror—as I do in you—caused me to feel my unhappiness really keenly and bitterly. Up to this point, dear wife, we have had only each other to deal with! However terrible it is for you, I ask you to read that letter once more; yes, I even plead with you to take it to heart to sympathize with my unhappiness; and it would make me very happy if in the future you'd give the lie to the reproaches contained in it—for on the other hand, as to a separation being the only solution, I am now fully converted and convinced of the contrary.
I revealed this decision to the only ones who took an active interest in my fate; namely, Frau Ritter and that young woman in Bordeaux. I did not hide from them the grief and the deep misery which I felt, the bleeding pain which that apparently necessary step caused me, and the feeling of the most infinite abandonment. Through the impression which this message made on the latter, it became apparent that I had kindled a violent attraction in the heart of the young woman. As a sixteen-year-old girl she had been married to a very handsome young man with whom she had fallen in love, but about whom it became clear to her, even before the marriage, that both—as she expressed it—did not have three thoughts in common. Her mother, a pleasant woman, but without any depth and merely worldly-wise, is, as I have found out recently, very rich, and had helped the son-in-law out of an impending bankruptcy with a not insignificant sum of money. As a result, husband and mother were always bound together—by a business as well as a personal interest—and the young woman, who felt more like a financial hostage, reconciled herself to the fate of living with a husband toward whom she felt indifferent, but who left her wholly undisturbed in all artistic endeavors and inclinations. From a distance she had already for years had a lively interest in me as an artist: after I got into this financial trouble, she believed herself called upon to help me substantially. I learned from her later the cause for the delay of her help: husband and mother did not understand her and could not see why my fate concerned them. Only after the Ritters had sent money, as agreed upon, was she able to persuade her family, by making them feel ashamed, to agree to what she offered you. Now she hoped to bring me into closer acquaintance with her family, hoping thus to make them feel even more ashamed. Indeed, the husband and mother were unusually courteous toward me after my arrival in Bordeaux, as I already wrote you. The poor young woman, who until that time had stood entirely alone in regard to her family, in that disgusting misers' nest and without any support, now took new hope. She strongly urged her family to leave this miserable Bordeaux: they had no need to keep on with business, they should get together with the families Ritter and Wagner, buy a place in Switzerland, etc. So long as her family looked upon this as a mere fantasy, they agreed gladly; when it became more serious, they grew silent and did not understand. I realized that this woman, too, was unhappy and was becoming conscious of her unhappiness. Her family was thinking of business and property administration, whereas she, on the other hand, thought of life itself. In the hour before my departure I had another terrible experience. They were talking about a hat which the husband once had brought her from Paris and which she had never put on. Then suddenly the husband broke forth with the words: "I know it; she never liked anything that came from me: I ought to thank God that I did not give her a child, for she would not have liked it either." To my horror, I now realized that the man knew that his wife did not love him, and with disgust and loathing I suddenly beheld a mother who for her part knew it too and yet was completely calm about it. But what else were these experiences for me than a confirmation of my long-nurtured opinion about the miserable loveless and heartless void of our whole so-called great world! It made no other impression on me than the greatest pity for the poor victim! But the resolution somehow to breathe freely had taken root in the soul of this victim. That message from me made a decisive impression on her, and she suddenly wrote to me that she was determined to leave her family and place herself under my protection. She told me this in such glowing and desperate passion that I was astounded and most deeply affected. I wrote her a wholly serious letter, described my situation to her in the most frightening terms, and emphasized the tremendously daring and fatal elements in her decision; she ought to think the matter over, whether she could decide to ruin herself in cold blood, for she would have to be prepared for that. At this same time I received a letter in Montmorency from Franck, who asked me, without any further explanation, to come to Paris immediately, since he had something urgent to tell me. I supposed one of my Zürich friends had written to him and asked him to sound me out about my last decision. It was simply impossible for me to discuss this matter just at this time, even with so well meaning a friend; I evaded him and left immediately for Geneva. I was in every respect so terribly perturbed and shaken that, come what might, my only thought was to go far, far away. I suddenly made the decision to go to Greece and therefore wrote to Bordeaux for the means to do it, leaving everything else uncertain, even almost untouched; this was rather calculated to discourage her. Then I received the news from Kietz, who had taken the chance of writing to me, general delivery, to half a dozen cities, that you yourself had been in Paris, hoping to find me and become reconciled. If you will concede me any heart at all, then you must understand how unutterably this news moved and grieved me. As I have said, even though you were in error about me, I still saw that your love was stronger than your error and that in any case you were differently affected by my letter than I had supposed. But, also imagine my torture, just now, and under this other desperate situation! I felt urged to write to you, but I could not possibly write you the truth; everything here was uncertain; it would have been the most insane cruelty on my part to reveal to you what had been going on, since I did not even know what the end of it would be. I only felt the urge to go forth into the wide, wide world. But I wanted to give you some consolation, however feeble! I wanted to treat you as a humane doctor would, to accustom you for the time being to a separation which then seemed more necessary than ever, even if I did not know whether it should last for a short while or forever. I had to assume that the news that I was going to Greece must seem almost conciliatory to you, since you could gather from that that I was not leaving just you but rather the whole world. If I was mistaken about this, forgive me. My intention was good; I could not write you that I knew you had been in Paris, for then I should have had to follow my heart and let you know that I would no longer hide from you. Truly, I was in great trouble, and the most disagreeable part of it was that I had to lie to you. For now I finally got the news from Bordeaux that the young woman was so violently affected by the content of my serious letter, and by the news that I wanted to go to Greece, that she could not hold back any longer: she openly betrayed her state of mind and revealed herself to her family. After this discovery they assumed the mask of hypocritical pity toward her and pretended to understand her decision, but they described me as a seducer and dishonest intriguer; I learned that the happy husband, in order to frighten his beloved wife, had written to me in Zürich and threatened to look for me everywhere and to take revenge on me, etc.—that was really too much! I wrote immediately, not to the young woman, but to the husband, enlightened him completely about my conduct as well as about his unfortunate relationship with his wife, and finally showed him that I would arrive in Bordeaux at the same time the letter did, but merely to defend myself in person and show him that I was not afraid. And that's what happened: honor and everything were at stake, and my position in regard to you, you poor woman, was so desperate that I did not fear death a moment more. For after such slanders it must have surely seemed as if I had left you for another woman! Neither the woman nor any one else had heard about my trip to Bordeaux, only the husband, and I pointed this out to him. I stopped at a hotel and wrote to him that I expected him. Then he showed how cowardly and miserable he really was! He had threatened me, and above all in a letter which, I had to assume, had fallen into your hands; and when I came to give him an explanation he eluded me, packed up wife and mother, who did not know the least bit about my arrival, and took them to the country in order to wait there in safety until I had been expelled by the police to whom he had reported me and against whom I could, of course, not defend myself since my passport had not been visaed by the ambassador. Thus ended this lamentable story; I really think not to my shame!
Enough; under all sorts of threats they wrung the solemn promise from the young woman not to write to me directly or indirectly, nor to receive messages from me. And they even pressed you in order to get evidence against me. That to me is the lowest thing, that they even tormented you, poor woman. They did not need any more and could have been satisfied, for never—they knew that—would I have divorced you, never married another. Thus the matter resolved itself! But still one cannot blame me if I feel deeply sorry for the young woman in question, just as I despise her husband and her mother from the bottom of my heart.
Let this suffice, dear Minna, to clarify my conduct in this affair. If you don't believe me, if you don't believe me absolutely, as I should be believed, you will only make yourself very unhappy! I'll not impose any conditions for my return to you, for—since I have learned of your state of mind—I have determined to return to you unconditionally. After what I have said, take counsel with yourself whether you can be completely reassured about me! If after all you can acquit me unconditionally, then try to understand also that my report to you from Paris deserves a different consideration than the one you are inclined to give it. Try to understand that I was very unhappy when I wrote to you as I did, and—try as much as possible to keep such unhappiness from both of us in the future. It lies in your hands! Be more unprejudiced toward me, and in general try to enter with a more friendly spirit into my whole character and thoughts! I hope we shall live together peacefully and happily till the end of our lives! Frau Ritter has asked me to look for a place for her and our family in Switzerland; only let it be near Zürich; that is my favorite place. And so, my good, sorely-tried, and steadfast wife, we have a new life to begin. Let the old one, with its recent experiences, be over with! Let us carry into our new life only the memories of pleasant things, faithful friends, and our good animals. Now we know definitely and clearly what we are to each other, and let us be sure to remain this way!
Give my heartiest greetings to my friends; tell them that they'll see me within this week. I'm delaying my trip only until you've received this letter and have made up your mind about it—for no other reason. May all disharmony have disappeared when we finally see each other again at last, after our painful separation! Let us now think only of the present and quietly and securely live for the future in the enjoyment of noble friendship. Give my special regards to Sulzer if he's still in Zürich—his letter made me so happy, and I thank him for it cordially!
Farewell, then, for today, my dear good old Minna! Within a few days I'll be with you and embrace you with all my heart,
Your
Richard
Have you a room ready for Karl? He was really happy about you and your faithfulness and now he's happy as a god that we're going to Zürich!—Greetings to Nette!
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner: The Burrell Collection, ed. John N. Burk (Macmillan, 1950), No. 96