Best thanks, dearest Friend, for your letter, from which I gather with delight that you all are well. — The further information about my project, for which you ask, I can give you at present only in so far as concerns my own intention, since Härtels have not yet sent a definite answer. However, I can assure you that all the chances feared by you have been well foreseen in my proposals. Naturally, nothing will be published before completion of the whole; only in case of my death ere such completion, or of my abandoning it, and consequently not observing the specified (and fairly distant) term, would such a thing be allowed, to recoup the publishers for payment of the honorarium. The stage-rights would of course be reserved to myself. Did you really think I was such a bad man of business, as to make no provisos about these points? Look! it annoys you to be always addressed as a business man, and you do me an injustice if you deny me any business-sense at all. Believe me, I too can count: unfortunately however, I always have such horrid things to discount, that it must not be accounted ill of me if for once in a way I miscount. Only give me such pleasant facts to recount, as must have happened now and again to yourself, and you'll be astonished at my accuracy.
My cure goes steadily and decisively forward. In any case I must stay here till the 16th August: for that date I already have the announcement of visitors from Germany (sister, friends, et al.).
You haven't made up your minds about the winter? Am I really to renew the experience of how a winter is passed in Zurich without the house of Wesendonck? I cannot get accustomed to it; I should have to haunt the house itself, which I suppose you'll leave standing. You vagabonds: to build yourselves a house and run away from it! Let me but have my house: I shall move in before the roof is on. God bless your dear self! Best greetings from
Your
R. W.
Source: Richard Wagner's Letters to Wesendonck et al., trans. and indexed by William Ashton Ellis (Grant Richards, 1899), No. 8