Best Child, I think it would be best to send the whole portfolio; I pledge myself, with all that's dear to me, that it shall return to its lady-owner unimpaired, and rather enriched than diminished. It would fall hard to point out everything that might need copying and despatching to us; so it's better that I should search among the things themselves.
It required a strong inducement, to get me to take any part in this, but my young King is just the man to set it all in order; he has the right pertinacity, and all his instigation springs from his own self. Now Semper has to build me a splendid new theatre (there's nothing else for it already), the best singers are to be fetched from all ends to represent my works, and — all my writings, of no matter when, must be culled from all hidden portfolios. Knowing that he must not give me much to do with it, he tactfully turns to my friends; and that's what he has done in this case also. At his often-repeated request, you see, I had had to state what I had written, and whither it had disappeared; so I had to denounce the big portfolio on the Green Hill too, — I couldn't help myself. But no harm is meant; simply, he wants everything collected, to take it in his charge and know that he possesses me entire.
Ay, child, he loves me; there's no gainsaying it! —
If things don't go quite right with me despite all that, no doubt there may be reasons. The lighter grows my freight of faith, the higher my insurance, — already I believe in next to nothing, and to fill that void it needs a quite prodigious ballast of royal favour! Once I was to be had cheaper; now my clairvoyance is terrible, and the illusion anent that fearful weakness everywhere, which shrunk back from me as from a madman, is becoming hardly possible to me again. Yet I do all I can, and still gladly await something better from men; in which my young King just assists me. He knows all, and — wills! — so I myself am bound to will too, tho' it often strikes my soul as strange. —
Best greeting to the Green Hill! — They told me lately, it had been offered for sale this summer; is that so? — Whither away then? — Am I quite too inquisitive? — Ought I to renew my kind thanks for the Christmas present? Did the big Micky expect it? Scarcely! There's another old letter to read, — shall I find that in the portfolio? —
Adieu! I recollect with love!
R. W.
Source: Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905), No. 151