my friends arranged a meeting one evening at which I was to read my poem on the Death of Siegfried.  I am prepared to swear that I never had more attentive listeners, among men, than on that evening.  The immediate effect of my success was the drawing up of a fully valid federal passport for the poor German under warrant of arrest, armed with which I started gaily on my journey to Paris after quite a short stay at Zurich.  From Strassburg, where I was enthralled by the fascination of the world-famous minster, I travelled towards Paris by what was then the best means of locomotion, the so-called malle-poste.  I remember a remarkable phenomenon in connection with this conveyance.  Till then the noise of the cannonade and musketry in the fighting at Dresden had been persistently re-echoing in my ears, especially in a half-waking condition; now the humming of the wheels, as we rolled rapidly along the highroad, cast such a spell upon me that for the whole of the journey I seemed to hear the melody of Freude, schoner Gotterfunken [Footnote:  See note on page 486.] from the Ninth Symphony being played, as it were, on deep bass instruments.

From the time of my entering Switzerland till my arrival in Paris my spirits, which had sunk into a dreamlike apathy, rose gradually to a level of freedom and comfort that I had never enjoyed before.  I felt like a bird in the air whose destiny is not to founder in a morass; but soon after my arrival in Paris, in the first week of June, a very palpable reaction set in.  I had had an introduction from Liszt to his former secretary Belloni, who felt it his duty, in loyalty to the instructions received, to put me into communication with a literary man, a certain Gustave Vaisse, with the object of being commissioned to write an opera libretto for production in Paris.  I did not, however, make the personal acquaintance of Vaisse.  The idea did not please me, and I found sufficient excuse for warding off the negotiations by saying I was afraid of the epidemic of cholera which was said to be raging in the city.  I was staying in the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette for the sake of being near Belloni.  Through this street funeral processions, announced by the muffled drum boats of the National Guard, passed practically every hour.  Though the heat was stifling, I was strictly forbidden to touch water, and was advised to exercise the greatest precaution with regard to diet in every respect.  Besides this weight of uneasiness on my spirits, the whole outward aspect of Paris, as it then appeared, had the most depressing effect on me.  The motto, liberte, egalite, fraternite was still to be seen on all the public buildings and other establishments, but, on the other hand, I was alarmed at seeing the first garcons caissiers making their way from the bank with their long money-sacks over their shoulders and their large portfolios in their hands.  I had never met them so frequently as now, just when the old capitalist regime, after its triumphant struggle