My good Minna,
I received your letter toward noon: at once I drew up the answer for you, and as that must catch the post by five — for which reason too, I cannot frank it — it leaves me very little time to enclose a few lines for yourself. It is impossible for any person to behave more nobly and delicately than our friend Mme Laussot! I should have thought, dear wife, it would really have uplifted you to see what a deep impression your husband's works are able to produce on healthy, undistorted, noble hearts; to see that he is in a position to arouse such sacrificial resolutions of sincerest sympathy! Can you prevail on your soul to think meanly of such a result of my art — for that alone has brought this forth — to say nothing of rating it lower than those so-called "brilliant" successes which nowadays are reaped by speculation and chicanery from the silly, sluttish, heartless rabble of our theatre-goers? You see what those cowardly sluggards whose favour I also once seemed to have captured now are, and how pitifully they behave to me. Are we to despise them and simply think of money? Good: here is money, as much as we need for a tranquil, nay, a comfortable life, — and that not juggled from the pockets of the crowd, but most delicately proffered me from a noble heart's delight in works I fashion after my true inner nature! What would you more? — For sure, my poor good wife, I've understood you; I know not only you, but what is actually at bottom of all your variance with me: in the answer to Mme Laussot I have hopes I've quite correctly hit your inner sense!
Nothing is so unwelcome to me, as to hear you are unwell; for unfortunately I could not act as a good nurse at present — even in thought — as I'm poorly enough myself. It is 4 weeks yesterday, since I arrived in Paris tired and ill: what has happened in those 4 weeks? what have I bought with all this sacrificing of my health and precious money? Listen! Belloni hasn't yet returned! He is not to get here till next week. Good! without him there was nothing else for me to take in hand, so I just stuck to the projected performance of my overtures. Belloni had written me, the parts would be copied out here at the expense of the musical society: after long fruitless searching, I find the conductor at last, and he discloses to me that the society is still too young and poor to afford the cost of copying: so there had been no preparations at all! Then I wrote off to Liszt, to send me at least the printed parts of the Tannhäuser overture he had borrowed from Dresden at once. Only yesterday evening did I at last receive those parts. — How I'm feeling under such vexation, trouble and annoyance — especially with my wearing and worrying bodily state — you may picture if you add my natural loathing of the whole of this cold, shallow, heartless Paris music-mongering. Here I literally seem as in a long, long night, in which I cannot sleep, dream half awake, turn first on this side, then on that, just to be — able to rest at last, i.e. to know no more of anything — and least of all, of Paris! O you foolish friends, who have nothing in your heads for me but speculation and a big to-do, how little you know me and what I need to make me happy. — Deliverance from this hell is all I wish for. My dear Wife — we'll spend next summer on ourselves, on health and Nature; that's my sole hope, my only comfort! Farewell; greet all; hold me dear.
Thy R. W.
Source: Richard to Minna Wagner: Letters to His First Wife, trans. William Ashton Ellis, Vol. 1 (H. Grevel & Co., 1909), No. 33