garden which I had admired, and which was only separated from his estate by a narrow carriage drive; and this Wesendonck decided to buy for me.  I rejoiced beyond measure when I heard of his intention.  The shock experienced by the over-cautious buyer was consequently all the greater when one day be discovered that the present owner, with whom he had negotiated in too timid a fashion, had just sold his piece of land to somebody else.  Luckily it turned out that the buyer was a mental specialist, whose sole intention in making the purchase was to instal himself with his lunatic asylum by the side of my friend.  This information awakened the most terrible anticipations in Wesendonck, and put the utmost strain upon his energy.  He now gave instructions that this piece of land must be acquired at any price from the unfortunate specialist.  Thus, after many vexatious vicissitudes, it came into the possession of my friend, who had to pay pretty heavily for it.  He allowed me to come into possession at Easter of this year, charging me the same rent as I had paid for my lodging in the Zeltweg, that is to say, eight hundred francs a year.

Our installation in this house, which occupied me heart and soul at the beginning of the spring, was not achieved without many a disappointment.  The cottage, which had only been designed for use in summer, had to be made habitable for the winter by putting in heating apparatus and various other necessaries.  It is true, that most of the essentials in this respect were carried out by the proprietor; but no end of difficulties remained to be solved.  There was not a single thing upon which my wife and I did not constantly differ, and my position as an ordinary middle-class man without a brass farthing of my own made matters no easier.  With regard to my finances, however, events took place from time to time which were well calculated to inspire a sanguine temperament with trustful confidence in the future.  In spite of the bad performances of my operas, Tannhauser brought me unexpectedly good royalties from Berlin.  From Vienna, too, I obtained the wherewithal to give me breathing-space in a most curious way.  I was still excluded from the Royal Opera, and I had been assured that so long as there was an imperial court, I was not to dream of a performance of my seditious works in Vienna.  This strange state of affairs inspired my old director, Hoffmann of Riga, now director of the Josephstadt Theatre, to venture on the production of Tannhauser with a special opera company, in a summer theatre built by himself on the Lerchenfeld outside the boundary of Vienna.  He offered me for every performance which I would license a royalty of a hundred francs.  When Liszt, whom I informed of the matter, thought this offer was suspicious, I wrote and told him that I proposed to follow Mirabeau’s example with regard to it.  Mirabeau, when he failed to be elected by his peers to the assembly of Notables, addressed himself to the electors of Marseilles in