often responded in a manner which, more often than not, I was perfectly right in ascribing to the effects of the wine rather than to the power of my enthusiasm.  Once when Professor Ettmuller, the Germanist and Edda scholar, had been invited to listen to a reading of my Siegfried and had been led home in a state of melancholy enthusiasm, there was a regular outburst of wanton spirits among those who had remained behind.  I conceived the absurd idea of lifting all the doors of the state official’s house off their hinges.

Herr Hagenbuch, another servant of the state, seeing what exertion this cost me, offered me the help of his gigantic physique, and with comparative ease we succeeded in removing every single door, and laying it aside, a proceeding at which Sulzer merely smiled good-naturedly.  The next day, however, when we made inquiries, he told us that the replacing of those doors (which must have been a terrible strain on his delicate constitution) had taken him the whole night, as he had made up his mind to keep the knowledge of our orgies from the sergeant, who always arrived at a very early hour in the morning.

The extraordinary birdlike freedom of my existence had the effect of exciting me more and more.  I was often frightened at the excessive outbursts of exaltation to which I was prone—­no matter whom I was with—­and which led me to indulge in the most extraordinary paradoxes in my conversation.  Soon after I had settled in Zurich I began to write down my various ideas about things at which I had arrived through my private and artistic experiences, as well as through the influence of the political unrest of the day.  As I had no choice but to try, to the best of my ability, to earn something by my pen, I thought of sending a series of articles to a great French journal such as the National, which in those days was still extant.  In these articles I meant to propound my ideas (in my revolutionary way) on the subject of modern art in its relation to society.  I sent six of them to an elderly friend of mine, Albert Franck, requesting him to have them translated into French and to get them published.  This Franck was the brother of the better-known Hermann Franck, now the head of the Franco-German bookselling firm, which had originally belonged to my brother-in-law, Avenarius.  He sent me back my work with the very natural remark that it was out of the question to expect the Parisian public to understand or appreciate my articles, especially at such a critical moment.

I headed the manuscript Kunst und Revolution (’Art and Revolution’) and sent it to Otto Wigand in Leipzig, who actually undertook to publish it in the form of a pamphlet, and sent me five louis d’or for it.  This unexpected success induced me to continue to exploit my literary gifts.  I looked among my papers for the essay I had written the year before as the outcome of my historical studies of the ‘Nibelungen’ legend; I gave it the title of Die Nibelungen Weltgeschichte aus der Sage, and again tried my luck by sending it to Wigand.