《我的生平——第一卷》

Then came the invitation from Mme. Laussot in Bordeaux. The Ritters had long been in correspondence with her family; Jessie Laussot, a young woman of twenty-two who read German poetry fluently and played the Beethoven B-flat Sonata with astonishing facility, had been intimate with them in Dresden. Wagner travelled by coach via Orléans, Tours, and Angoulême down to the Gironde and was received at the wine-merchant’s house by Jessie, her absent husband Eugène, and the deaf Mrs. Taylor. The two families offered him three thousand francs a year. He read Jessie his poems; she preferred Wieland der Schmied to Siegfried’s Tod. As he came to know the household he saw the unhappily married couple and the gulf between Jessie and her mother. From Dresden came word that Röckel, Bakunin, and Heubner had been sentenced to death; he wrote them farewell letters through Frau von Lüttichau, who burned them unread. Pressed by Minna’s letters, he resolved to break with everyone: to divide the Laussot income with his wife and vanish with his half to Greece or Asia Minor. Jessie hinted at sharing his fate.

He left Bordeaux in late April, stunned, and after a week at the Hôtel Valois in Paris retreated to Montmorency, where he put up at the inn of a wine-merchant named Homo. In a tiny bedroom with two cane-bottomed chairs he set out his Lohengrin score and writing materials. He sent the Lohengrin score to Liszt, summoned Kietz, and felt for a moment free as a bird. But Minna herself now arrived in Paris to look for him. Wagner instructed Kietz to tell her nothing; that night he left for Clermont-Tonnerre and then Geneva, where Karl Ritter joined him at the empty Hôtel Byron in Villeneuve. There, with his young friend beside him, he prepared Siegfried’s Tod for publication and allowed himself, briefly, the hope of a new life.