It took things more than a couple of years to quiet down.  Meantime a warrant was out for Richard’s arrest.  His movements between Dresden, Chemnitz and Freiberg are of no interest nowadays; but things became a little exciting from the day, May 13 (1849), when he arrived at Liszt’s.  I have related how for a week or so all seemed well, and Wagner thought himself safe, being out of Saxony.  He even intended witnessing a representation of Tannhaeuser, but the day before, if not sooner, the warrant was circulated in the German fashion of those days, with a personal description which seems to have been made purposely vague by some friendly hand, though more naturally one would assume it to be due to official stupidity.  Wagner heard Liszt rehearsing something of his and was overjoyed, and also he was so confident of his own security that he still wanted to stay to hear Tannhaeuser.  Liszt would not hear of it; he packed his friend off under an assumed name to some other friends; they procured a passport, and he travelled to Zurich via Jena and Coburg.  It should be put on record that in the meantime he ran the risk of being captured by lingering to have a last hour with his wife.  Towards the end of the month he reached Zurich, and had no more fear of the Prussian police.

We have already seen how sick he had grown of Dresden, where he complained of being slowly stifled; but Liszt proposed—­nay, insisted—­on something worse than Dresden—­Paris.  Wagner was now a penniless, homeless wanderer, as he had been when he set out from Riga ten years before; and Liszt fondly believed that only by making a hit in Paris could he command any enduring success in Germany, and thus gain money to live on, wherever he might happen to be.  Liszt was the good genie who found the funds, and Wagner, having nothing better to propose, was bound to obey.  So he stayed three days in Zurich and set out; and a deal of good he did!  He knew absolutely that such work as his could scarcely hope to get so much as a bare hearing, and the event proved him to be right.  He submitted scenarios of several operas to a French poet, and there, for all practical purposes, the business ended.  Here is a fragment from a letter to Theodor Uhlig, dated Zurich, August 9, ’49—­

“I am living here, helped in communistic fashion by Liszt, in good spirits, and I may say prosperously, according to my best nature; my only and great anxiety is about my poor wife, whom I am expecting here very shortly.  To my very great astonishment, I find that I am a celebrity here; made so, indeed, by means of the piano scores of all my operas, out of which whole acts are repeatedly performed at concerts and at choral unions.  At the beginning of the winter I shall go again to Paris to have something performed and to put my opera matter into order.  You cannot imagine what joy one finds in frugality if one knows that thereby the noblest thing, freedom, is assured; you know how long I was brewing in my blood the