My Dear Anton!
They are not taking remittances for Saxony at the post-office: and I also cannot obtain a draft here on Dresden for the small amount which I wish to send to my sister-in-law Natalie as her quarterly allowance. Since the poor woman will now be in great distress, I am taxing your inexhaustible kindness once more with the request that you make this small disbursement for me. I have bound myself to pay only 30 thalers quarterly: for this time, I am allotting her fifty thalers, in order somewhat to help the wants of the unfortunate woman, to whom nothing worse could have happened, in her starting the business of letting out lodgings, than this very time of war. Will you be good enough to deliver this amount to her in my name, and so relieve me of an anxiety? As soon as the country is again open to such communications, I will at once send the amount expended back to you. Trust me to do that!
How strange I feel to find Dresden now occupied once again by the Prussians, and to know that the royal family have this time fled from them!! — I am having my troubles: you will shortly be told all about that again! For every testimonial of the wonderful, well-nigh ardent partiality of the young King of Bavaria for me, I have to repay it each time with a thorough hail of infamies thrust at me by vileness itself. Now I only wish to be able once for all to remain peacefully on the spot: my work is running along again, and The Mastersingers grows daily. Wish me luck: this composition will next year, I hope, at last bring us once more together.
Likewise the ordering of the gravestone is better left until more peaceful times! My most cordial regards to your dear wife and good children: also to poor Natalie.
Your sincerely befriended and ever thankful
Richard Wagner
Source: The Letters of Richard Wagner to Anton Pusinelli, trans. and ed. Elbert Lenrow (Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), No. 47