Dearest Friend!
There seems to be no end of my demands upon you for payments of various sorts, without my having been able to deposit with your treasurer fresh supplies for myself. This I hope to be able to do within the next few days. . . .
I shall try to keep my time free for the next meeting of our “circle,” and beg of you to inform the gentlemen this evening that I hope to beg their pardon in sackcloth and ashes next Thursday.
Ach Gott! if friends would just drop in any evening! The devil is to pay here at eight o'clock; there is always beer and also cigars; you could seat yourselves in the garden before the music-room and we would make music for you. But—?!
Cordial greetings from
Your ever grateful
Richard Wagner.
Source: The Story of Bayreuth as Told in the Bayreuth Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Caroline V. Kerr (Small, Maynard and Company, 1912), No. 78