Dear Natalie!
I thank you for your friendly letters, which I could not answer immediately since I was often delayed. The sad message of Minna's death reached me, as you know, when I was far away: to say anything about it is still impossible for me. I myself live only through the conviction that I am destined to write important works: this alone gives me the strength to bear the disgusting annoyances to which my life is continually exposed and which I'm glad to have kept from Minna in the last years.
According to what the excellent friend Pusinelli wrote me, it would be advisable for you to furnish a small apartment with the furniture Minna left you and to rent it. As I promised, I shall send you 30 thalers quarterly (this time 6 Napoleons d'or), and begin today. I hope this will make it a little easier for you, since you are modest and unassuming. Besides, life is again being made very difficult for me just now, since I had to decide, in order to get away from the awful disturbances, to live away from my house in Munich for some time, which makes it much more difficult for me to get along; and I don't want to ask for any kind of compensation for this, because this would at once bring new slanders on my head, considering the terrific envy to which I am exposed. Thus I offer you what I can actually spare only by making sacrifices, and I'll be so much the happier if it is of use to you.
I hope to be able to visit Dresden in the fall: if the matter can wait so long, I should then like to take the necessary steps to get a worthy tombstone for poor Minna; but I'm also prepared to consider any propositions which you might want to make to me before that.
Try then, you poor, good Natalie, to help yourself through life as well as you can: that you are not without friends you can see in me, and you shall continue to find it so in the future to the best of my ability.
If Minna has kept my letters, I hope she has not disposed of them, and I should like to get them back into my hands. I should also like to have back our pencil portraits which Kietz once made in Paris.
Otherwise I claim nothing, unless the deceased may have left something to me personally.
Farewell, dear Natalie! Let me know where you will be staying and be assured of my continued warm interest. With best regards from your
Richard Wagner
Please give my warmest regards to the noble, cherished friend, Dr. Pusinelli.
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner: The Burrell Collection, ed. John N. Burk (Macmillan, 1950), No. 284