Nevertheless, on Palm Sunday of the new year, 1849, I received ample amends.  In order to ensure liberal receipts, our orchestra had again decided to produce Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.  Every one did his utmost to make this one of our finest performances, and the public took up the matter with real enthusiasm.  Michael Bakunin, unknown to the police, had been present at the public rehearsal.  At its close he walked unhesitatingly up to me in the orchestra, and said in a loud voice, that if all the music that had ever been written were lost in the expected world-wide conflagration, we must pledge ourselves to rescue this symphony, even at the peril of our lives.  Not many weeks after this performance it really seemed as though this world-wide conflagration would actually be kindled in the streets of Dresden, and that Bakunin, with whom I had meanwhile become more closely associated through strange and unusual circumstances, would undertake the office of chief stoker.

It was long before this date that I first made the acquaintance of this most remarkable man.  For years I had come across his name in the newspapers, and always under extraordinary circumstances.  He turned up in Paris at a Polish gathering, but although he was a Russian, he declared that it mattered little whether a man were a Russian or a Pole, so long as he wanted to be a free man, and that this was all that mattered.  I heard afterwards, through George Herwegh, that he had renounced all his sources of income as a member of an influential Russian family, and that one day, when his entire fortune consisted of two francs, he had given them away to a beggar on the boulevard, because it was irksome to him to be bound by this possession to take any thought for the morrow.  I was informed of his presence in Dresden one day by Rockel, after the latter had become a rampant republican.  He had taken the Russian into his house, and invited me to come and make his acquaintance.  Bakunin was at that time being persecuted by the Austrian government for his share in the events which took place in Prague in the summer of 1848, and because he was a member of the Slav Congress which had preceded them.  He had consequently sought refuge in our city, as he did not wish to settle too far from the Bohemian frontier.  The extraordinary sensation he had created in Prague arose from the fact that, when the Czechs sought the protection of Russia against the dreaded Germanising policy of Austria, he conjured them to defend themselves with fire and sword against those very Russians, and indeed against any other people who lived under the rule of a despotism like that of the Tsars.  This superficial acquaintance with Balumin’s aims had sufficed to change the purely national prejudices of the Germans against him into sympathy.  When I met him, therefore, under the humble shelter of Rockel’s roof, I was immediately struck by his singular and altogether imposing personality.  He was in the full bloom