The property of which she spoke consisted of a Breitkopf and Hartel grand-piano that looked better than it sounded, and of the ‘title-page’ of the Nibelungen by Cornelius in a Gothic frame that used to hang over my desk in Dresden.

With this nucleus of household effects we now decided to take small lodgings in the so-called ‘hinteren Escherhausern’ in the Zeltweg.  With great cleverness Minna had succeeded in selling the Dresden furniture to advantage, and out of the proceeds of this sale she had brought three hundred marks with her to Zurich to help towards setting up our new home.  She told me that she had saved my small but very select library for me by giving it into the safe custody of the publisher, Heinrich Brockhaus (brother of my sister’s husband and member of the Saxon Diet), who had insisted upon looking after it.  Great, therefore, was her dismay when, upon asking this kind friend to send her the books, he replied that he was holding them as security for a debt of fifteen hundred marks which I had contracted with him during my days of trouble in Dresden, and that he intended to keep them until that sum was returned.  As even after the lapse of many years I found it impossible to refund this money, these books, collected for my own special wants, were lost to me for ever.

Thanks more particularly to my friend Sulzer, the Cantonal Secretary, whom my wife at first despised so much on account of his title which she misunderstood, and who, although he was far from well-off himself, thought it only natural that he should help me, however moderately, out of my difficulties, we soon succeeded in making our little place look so cosy that my simple Zurich friends felt quite at home in it.  My wife, with all her undeniable talents, hero found ample scope in which to distinguish herself, and I remember how ingeniously she made a little what-not out of the box in which she had kindly brought my music and manuscript to Zurich.

But it was soon time to think of how to earn enough money to provide for us all.  My idea of giving public lectures was treated with contempt by my wife, who looked upon it as an insult to her pride.  She could acquiesce only in one plan, that suggested by Liszt, namely, that I should write an opera for Paris.  To satisfy her, and in view of the fact that I could see no chance of a remunerative occupation close at hand, I actually reopened a correspondence on this matter with my great friend and his secretary Belloni in Paris.  In the meantime I could not be idle, so I accepted an invitation from the Zurich musical society to conduct a classical composition at one of their concerts, and to this end I worked with their very poor orchestra at Beethoven’s Symphony in A major.  Although the result was successful, and I received five napoleons for my trouble, it made my wife very unhappy, for she could not forget the excellent orchestra, and the much more appreciative public, which a short time before in Dresden would