I had a very surprising adventure to-day. I presented myself at a Customs office to collect my things, which had arrived from Lucerne. The trunks were down in the book, but not my name. I showed my letter of advice and gave my name, whereupon one of the officials [Edmond Roche] rose and said, "Je connais bien M. Richard Wagner, puisque j'ai son médaillon suspendu sur mon piano, et je suis son plus ardent admirateur." "Quoi?" "Ne soyez pas surpris de rencontrer à la douane de Paris un homme capable de goûter les incomparables beautés de vos partitions, que j'ai étudiées toutes," etc.
I was like a man in a dream. An enthusiast at the douane, where I was expecting great difficulties in collecting my furniture! The good man sprang up and ran to help me. He insisted on making the examination himself. He had a wife who played the piano very well. He himself had literary aspirations and in the meantime lived by his official appointment. He told me of an extensive circle who had educated themselves almost entirely through the spread of the knowledge of my works. As he did not understand German, I demurred that I could not see how he could have found pleasure in music which was intimately connected with poetry and the actual turn of verse. To this he rejoined that it was just because of this very definite and close connection with the poetic speech, that he was able to deduce the poetry from the music and that, therefore, the foreign language became completely intelligible to him through the music. What could I say? I must begin to believe in miracles! [...] I have asked my new friend, who has touched me deeply, [...] to visit me.
Do you know, I have ceased to feel that my operas are such a paradoxical impossibility in Paris? Bülow has given me an introduction to a physician and author here, Dr. Gaspérini, and he and a friend, likewise a typical Frenchman, are just in the same case as my Customs officer. These people play Tannhäuser and Lohengrin to me without leaving me a word to say. The fact that they do not know German does not trouble them in the very least. The director of the Théâtre Lyrique [Carvalho] announced his desire to hear me go through Tannhäuser. They all came together, and I had to endure the strain of going through it, first with exact explanations of the text in French (what that cost me!) and then singing and playing from it. Then at last they actually began to see daylight, and the impression made on them seemed to be remarkable. All this seems so fabulous to me with these Frenchmen!
On the other hand, the news I receive from Germany is gloomy and glum. Friend Devrient cares for nothing but the smooth running of his "Institute" and keeps everything unusual and experimental at a distance as possibly disturbing. [...]
Yes, children! If only you had got so far in Switzerland, by way of gratitude for the honest sweat I have expended there, as to build me even a passable theatre, I should have what I need for ever and should ask nothing further of anyone! I should manage to get together the singers and orchestra I needed for the first performance of each new work as I came to it. Conductors and singers should be summoned to these performances to see a model interpretation, and, once this was in existence, I should feel I had provided for everything and would live in peace without troubling about the further fate of my works. How sublime, how beautiful, how utterly answering to my wants that would be! I should then need no princes, no amnesty, no word from anyone, good or bad. I should be free and exempt from all anxiety about posterity. [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 2, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 436