The sensational title of Kunst und Revolution, as well as the notoriety the ‘royal conductor’ had gained as a political refugee, had made the radical publisher hope that the scandal that would arise on the publication of my articles would redound to his benefit!  I soon discovered that he was on the point of issuing a second edition of Kunst und Revolution, without, however, informing me of the fact.  He also took over my new pamphlet for another five louis d’or.  This was the first time I had earned money by means of published work, and I now began to believe that I had reached that point when I should be able to get the better of my misfortunes.  I thought it over, and decided to give public lectures in Zurich on subjects related to my writings during the coming winter, hoping in that free and haphazard fashion to keep body and soul together for a little while, although I had no fixed appointment and did not intend to work at music.

It seemed necessary for me to resort to these means, as I did not know how otherwise to keep myself alive.  Shortly after my arrival in Zurich I had witnessed the coming of the fragments of the Baden army, dispersed over Swiss territory, and accompanied by fugitive volunteers, and this had made a painful and uncanny impression upon me.  The news of the surrender near Villagos by Gorgey paralysed the last hopes as to the issue of the great European struggle for liberty, which so far had been left quite undecided.  With some misgiving and anxiety I now turned my eyes from all these occurrences in the outside world inwards to my own soul.

I was accustomed to patronise the cafe litteraire, where I took my coffee after my heavy mid-day meal, in a smoky atmosphere surrounded by a merry and joking throng of men playing dominoes and ‘fast.’  One day I stared at its common wall-paper representing antique subjects, which in some inexplicable way recalled a certain water-colour by Genelli to my mind, portraying ‘The education of Dionysos by the Muses.’  I had seen it at the house of my brother-in-law Brockhaus in my young days, and it had made a deep impression on me at the time.  At this same place I conceived the first ideas of my Kunstwerk der Zukunft (’The Art-Work of the Future’), and it seemed a significant omen to me to be roused one day out of one of my post-prandial dreams by the news that Schroder-Devrient was staying in Zurich.  I immediately got up with the intention of calling on her at the neighbouring hotel, ‘Zum Schwerte,’ but to my great dismay heard that she had just left by steamer.  I never saw her again, and long afterwards only heard of her painful death from my wife, who in later years became fairly intimate with her in Dresden.