Best Mutzigen,
We are making vairses —!
Your verses were decidedly the best, though; there was a swing about them that made a deep impression on me! They leave me nothing but to thank you in prose; and that I'm doing. —
But how about your dress? Is it being worked at? — As the elastic doesn't appear on your account, have you by any chance been borrowing money off Sulzer? Fie on you! But I suppose you will pay him back now? If only he'll accept it! —
My longing for home and the pretty abode is growing stronger and stronger, and I really am looking forward very much to my return; but the wet packings are still too imperative, since my eruption is coming out over a great part of my body now, in fact very painfully. The rest of the cure I can easily pursue at home; if necessary, indeed, you can — in fact, must — wet-pack me yourself now and then: only, I can't undertake a regular course of these packings at home with you, as certain things will not comport with them at all; so I must get finished with that part of it here. Nevertheless I'll fix a latest limit, that you may not jump out of your skin for impatience: I shall leave here Sunday morning the 23rd of November; that day I'll pass alone with you at Zurich, and Monday the 24th we will celebrate our wedding-day. So long — you'll have to wait — there's no help for it; but between this and then I expect to have got my skin quite clear as well, and consequently to regard my cure as finished and complete. So — that is settled. Muzius, do make a reasonable face at it! —
Karl suddenly drove off to town the other day — after 3 o'clock — to buy himself a very handsome dressing-gown; in which he succeeded: only, it had become too late for him to call on you as well. — Couldn't you send Nette to the music-shop, to remind them to send me off the old musical journals? I suppose you have returned those I gave you last time. —
But why do you send me no night-shirts? Oh! — Now, good Minel, a fond farewell! Don't flirt too much; it might do you harm. Get on with the dress, and hold me dear.
Thy (in Christo!)
Source: Richard to Minna Wagner: Letters to His First Wife, trans. William Ashton Ellis, Vol. 1 (H. Grevel & Co., 1909), No. 45