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Suddenly a perception of that element which I had so long missed in the German people was borne in upon me in all its essential freshness and vital colour. The fact that until this moment I had been obliged to resign myself to its absence, had contributed not a little to the feelings by which I had been swayed. Here I beheld some thousand men from the Erzgebirge, mostly miners, well armed and organised, who had rallied to the defence of Dresden. Soon we saw them march up the Altmarkt opposite the Town Hall, and after receiving a joyful welcome, bivouac there to recover from their journey. Reinforcements continued to pour in the whole day long, and the heroic achievement of the previous day now received its reward in the shape of a universal elevation of spirits. A change seemed to have been made in the plan of attack by the Prussian troops. This could be gathered from the fact that numerous simultaneous attacks, but of a less concentrated type, were made upon various positions. The troops which had come to reinforce us brought with them four small cannon, the property of a certain Herr Thade von Burgk, whose acquaintance I had made before on the occasion of the anniversary of the founding of the Dresden Choral Society, when he had made a speech which was well intentioned but wearisome to the point of being ludicrous. The recollection of this speech returned to me with peculiar irony, now that his cannon were being fired from the barricade upon the enemy. I felt a still deeper impression, however, when, towards eleven o’clock, I saw the old Opera House, in which a few weeks ago I had conducted the last performance of the Ninth Symphony, burst into flames. As I have had occasion to mention before, the danger from fire to which this building was exposed, full as it was with wood and all kind of textile fabric, and originally built only for a temporary purpose, had always been a subject of terror and apprehension to those who visited it.
I was told that the Opera House had been set alight on strategical grounds, in order to face a dangerous attack on this exposed side, and also to protect the famous ‘Semper’ barricade from an overpowering surprise. From this I concluded that reasons of this kind act as far more powerful motives in the world than aesthetic considerations. For a long time men of taste had vainly cried aloud for abolition of this ugly building which was such an eyesore by the side of the elegant proportions of the Zwinger Gallery in its neighbourhood. In a few moments the Opera House (which as regards size was, it is true, an imposing edifice), together with its highly inflammable contents, was a vast sea of flames. When this reached the metal roofs of the neighbouring wings of the Zwinger, and enveloped them in wonderful bluish waves of fire, the first expression of regret made itself audible amongst the spectators. What a disaster! Some thought that the Natural History collection was in danger; others maintained that it was the Armoury, upon which a citizen soldier retorted that if such were the case, it would be a very good job if the ‘stuffed noblemen’ were burnt to cinders. But it appeared that a keen sense of the value of art knew how to curb the fire’s lust for further dominion, and, as a matter of fact, it did but little damage in that quarter. Finally our post of observation, which until now had remained comparatively quiet, was filled itself with swarms and swarms of armed men, who had been ordered thither to defend the approach from the church to the Altmarkt, upon which an attack was feared from the side of the ill-secured Kreuzgasse. Unarmed men were now in the way; moreover, I had received a message from my wife summoning me home after the long and terrible anxiety she had suffered.
At last, after meeting with innumerable obstacles and overcoming a host of difficulties, I succeeded, by means of all sorts of circuitous routes, in reaching my remote suburb, from which I was cut off by the fortified portions of the town, and especially by a cannonade directed from the Zwinger. My lodgings were full to overflowing with excited women who had collected round Minna; among them the panic-stricken wife of Röckel, who suspected her husband of being in the very thick of the fight, as she thought that on the receipt of the news that Dresden had risen he would probably have returned. As a matter of fact, I had heard a rumour that Röckel had arrived on this very day, but as yet I had not obtained a glimpse of him. My young nieces helped once more to raise my spirits. The firing had put them into a high state of glee, which to some extent infected my wife, as soon as she was reassured as to my personal safety. All of them were furious with the sculptor Hänel, who had never ceased insisting upon the expedience of bolting the house to prevent an entry of the revolutionaries. All the women without exception were joking about his abject terror at the sight of some men armed with scythes who had appeared in the street In this way Sunday passed like a sort of family jollification. On the following morning (Monday, 8th May) I tried again to get information as to the state of affairs by forcing my way to the Town Hall from my house, which was cut off from the place of action. As in the course of my journey I was making my way over a barricade near St. Ann’s Church, one of the Communal Guard shouted out to me, ‘Hullo, conductor, your der Freude schöner Götterfunken[15] has indeed set fire to things. The rotten building is rased to the ground.’ Obviously the man was an enthusiastic member of the audience at my last performance of the Ninth Symphony. Coming upon me so unexpectedly, this pathetic greeting filled me with a curious sense of strength and freedom.
A little further on, in a lonely alley in the suburb of Plauen, I fell in with the musician Hiebendahl, the first oboist in the royal orchestra, and a man who still enjoyed a very high reputation; he was in the uniform of the Communal Guards, but carried no gun, and was chatting with a citizen in a similar costume. As soon as he saw me, he felt he must immediately make an appeal to me to use my influence against Röckel, who, accompanied by ordnance officers of the revolutionary party, was instituting a search for guns in this quarter. As soon as he realised that I was making sympathetic inquiries about Röckel, he drew back frightened, and said to me in tones of the deepest anxiety: ‘But, conductor, have you no thought for your position, and what you may lose by exposing yourself in this fashion?’ This remark had the most drastic effect upon me; I burst into a loud laugh, and told him that my position was not worth a thought one way or the other. This indeed was the expression of my real feelings, which had long been suppressed, and now broke out into almost jubilant utterance. At that moment I caught sight of Röckel, with two men of the citizen army who were carrying some guns, making his way towards me. He gave me a most friendly greeting, but turned at once to Hiebendahl and his companion and asked him why he was idling about here in uniform instead of being at his post. When Hiebendahl made the excuse that his gun had been requisitioned, Röckel cried out to him, ‘You’re a fine lot of fellows!’ and went away laughing. He gave me a brief account as we proceeded of what had happened to him since I had lost sight of him, and thus spared me the obligation of giving him a report of his Volksblatt. We were interrupted by an imposing troop of well-armed young students of the gymnasium who had just entered the city and wished to have a safe conduct to their place of muster.
The sight of these serried ranks of youthful figures, numbering several hundreds, who were stepping bravely to their duty, did not fail to make the most elevating impression upon me. Röckel undertook to accompany them over the barricade in safety to the mastering place in front of the Town Hall. He took the opportunity of lamenting the utter absence of true spirit which he had hitherto encountered in those in command. He had proposed, in case of extremity, to defend the most seriously threatened barricades by tiring them with pitch brands; at the mere word the provisional government had fallen into a veritable state of panic. I let him go his way in order that I might enjoy the privilege of a solitary person and reach the Town Hall by a short cut, and it was not until thirteen years later that I again set eyes upon him. [15] These words refer to the opening of the Ninth Symphony chorus: ‘Freude, Freude, Freude, schöner götterfunken Tochter aus Elysium’—(Praise her, praise oh praise Joy, the god-descended daughter of Elysium.) English version by Natalia Macfarren.—Editor. In the Town Hall I learned from Bakunin that the provisional government had passed a resolution, on his advice, to abandon the position in Dresden, which had been entirely neglected from the beginning, and was consequently quite untenable for any length of time. This resolution proposed an armed retreat to the Erzgebirge, where it would be possible to concentrate the reinforcements pouring in from all sides, especially from Thuringia, in such strength, that the advantageous position could be used to inaugurate a German civil war that would sound no hesitating note at its outset. To persist in defending isolated barricaded streets in Dresden could, on the other hand, lend little but the character of an urban riot to the contest, although it was pursued with the highest courage. I must confess that this idea seemed to me magnificent and full of meaning.
Up to this moment I had been moved only by a feeling of sympathy for a method of procedure entered upon at first with almost ironical incredulity, and then pursued with the vigour of surprise. Now, however, all that had before seemed incomprehensible, unfolded itself before my vision in the form of a great and hopeful solution. Without either feeling that I was in any way being compelled, or that it was my vocation to get some part or function allotted to me in these events, I now definitely abandoned all consideration for my personal situation, and determined to surrender myself to the stream of developments which flowed in the direction towards which my feelings had driven me with a delight that was full of despair. Still, I did not wish to leave my wife helpless in Dresden, and I rapidly devised a means of drawing her into the path which I had chosen, without immediately informing her of what my resolve meant. During my hasty return to Friedrichstadt I recognised that this portion of the town had been almost entirely cut off from the inner city by the occupation of the Prussian troops; I saw in my mind’s eye our own suburb occupied, and the consequences of a state of military siege in their most repulsive light. It was an easy job to persuade Minna to accompany me on a visit, by way of the Tharanderstrasse, which was still free, to Chemnitz, where my married sister Clara lived. It was only a matter of a moment for her to arrange her household orders, and she promised to follow me to the next village in an hour with the parrot. I went on in advance with my little dog Peps, in order to hire a carriage in which to proceed on our journey to Chemnitz. It was a smiling spring morning when I traversed for the last time the paths I had so often trod on my lonely walks, with the knowledge that I should never wander along them again. While the larks were soaring to dizzy heights above my head, and singing in the furrows of the fields, the light and heavy artillery did not cease to thunder down the streets of Dresden.
The noise of this shooting, which had continued uninterruptedly for several days, had hammered itself so indelibly upon my nerves, that it continued to re-echo for a long time in my brain; just as the motion of the ship which took me to London had made me stagger for some time afterwards. Accompanied by this terrible music, I threw my parting greeting to the towers of the city that lay behind me, and said to myself with a smile, that if, seven years ago, my entry had taken place under thoroughly obscure auspices, at all events my exit was conducted with some show of pomp and ceremony. When at last I found myself with Minna in a one-horse carriage on the way to the Erzgebirge, we frequently met armed reinforcements on their way to Dresden. The sight of them always kindled an involuntary joy in us; even my wife could not refrain from addressing words of encouragement to the men; at present it seemed not a single barricade had been lost. On the other hand, a gloomy impression was made upon us by a company of regulars which was making its way towards Dresden in silence. We asked some of them whither they were bound; and their answer, ‘To do their duty,’ had been obviously impressed upon them by command. At last we reached my relations in Chemnitz. I terrified all those near and dear to me when I declared my intention to return to Dresden on the following day at the earliest possible hour, in order to ascertain how things were going there. In spite of all attempts to dissuade me, I carried out my decision, pursued by a suspicion that I should meet the armed forces of the Dresden people on the country highroad in the act of retreat. The nearer I approached the capital, the stronger became the confirmation of the rumours that, as yet, there was no thought in Dresden of surrender or withdrawal, but that, on the contrary, the contest was proving very favourable for the national party. All this appeared to me like one miracle after another.
On this day, Tuesday, 9th of May, I once more forced my way in a high state of excitement over ground which had become more and more inaccessible. All the highways had to be avoided, and it was only possible to make progress through such houses as had been broken through. At last I reached the Town Hall in the Altstadt, just as night was falling. A truly terrible spectacle met my eyes, for I crossed those parts of the town in which preparations had been made for a house-to-house fight. The incessant groaning of big and small guns reduced to an uncanny murmur all the other sounds that came from armed men ceaselessly crying out to one another from barricade to barricade, and from one house to another, which they had broken through. Pitch brands burnt here and there, pale-faced figures lay prostrate around the watch-posts, half dead with fatigue, and any unarmed wayfarer forcing a path for himself was sharply challenged. Nothing, however, that I have lived through can be compared with the impression that I received on my entry into the chambers of the Town Hall. Here was a gloomy, and yet fairly compact and serious mass of people; a look of unspeakable fatigue was upon all faces; not a single voice had retained its natural tone. There was a hoarse jumble of conversation inspired by a state of the highest tension. The only familiar sight that survived was to be found in the old servants of the Town Hall in their curious antiquated uniform and three-cornered hats. These tall men, at other times an object of considerable fear, I found engaged partly in buttering pieces of bread, and cutting slices of ham and sausage, and partly in piling into baskets immense stores of provisions for the messengers sent by the defenders of the barricades for supplies. These men had turned into veritable nursing mothers of the revolution.
As I proceeded further, I came at last upon the members of the provisional government, among whom Todt and Tschirner, after their first panic-stricken flight, were once more to be found gliding to and fro, gloomy as spectres, now that they were chained to the performance of their heavy duties. Heubner alone had preserved his full energy; but he was a really piteous sight: a ghostly fire burned in his eyes which had not had a wink of sleep for seven nights. He was delighted to see me again, as he regarded my arrival as a good omen for the cause which he was defending; while on the other hand, in the rapid succession of events, he had come into contact with elements about which no conclusion could shape itself to his complete satisfaction. I found Bakunin’s outlook undisturbed, and his attitude firm and quiet. He did not show the smallest change in his appearance, in spite of having had no sleep during the whole time, which I afterwards heard was a fact. With a cigar in his mouth he received me, seated on one of the mattresses which lay distributed over the floor of the Town Hall. At his side was a very young Pole (a Galician) named Haimberger, a violinist whom he had once asked me to recommend to Lipinsky, in order that he might give him lessons, as he did not want this raw and inexperienced boy, who had become passionately attached to him, to get drawn into the vortex of the present upheavals. Now that Haimberger had shouldered a gun, and presented himself for service at the barricades, however, Bakunin had greeted him none the less joyfully. He had drawn him down to sit by his side on the couch, and every time the youth shuddered with fear at the violent sound of the cannon-shot, he slapped him vigorously on the back and cried out: ‘You are not in the company of your fiddle here, my friend. What a pity you didn’t stay where you were!’ Bakinin then gave me a short and precise account of what had happened since I had left him on the previous morning.
The retreat which had then been decided upon soon proved unadvisable, as it would have discouraged the numerous reinforcements which had already arrived on that day. Moreover, the desire for fighting had been so great, and the force of the defenders so considerable, that it had been possible to oppose the enemy’s troops successfully so far. But as the latter had also got large reinforcements, they again had been able to make an effective combined attack on the strong Wildstruf barricade. The Prussian troops had avoided fighting in the streets, choosing instead the method of fighting from house to house by breaking through the walls. This had made it clear that all defence by barricades had become useless, and that the enemy would succeed slowly but surely in drawing near the Town Hall, the seat of the provisional government. Bakunin had now proposed that all the powder stores should be brought together in the lower rooms of the Town Hall, and that on the approach of the enemy it should be blown up. The town council, who were still in consultation in a back room, had remonstrated with the greatest vehemence. Bakunin, however, had insisted with great firmness on the execution of the measure, but in the end had been completely outwitted by the removal of all the powder stores. Moreover, Heubner, to whom Bakunin could refuse nothing, had been won over to the other side. It was now decided that as everything was ready, the retreat to the Erzgebirge, which had originally been intended for the previous day, should be fixed for the early morrow. Young Zichlinsky had already received orders to cover the road to Plauen so as to make it strategically safe. When I inquired after Röckel, Bakunin replied swiftly that he had not been seen since the previous evening, and that he had most likely allowed himself to be caught: he was in such a nervous state.
I now gave an account of what I had observed on my way to and from Chemnitz, describing the great masses of reinforcements, amongst which was the communal guard of that place, several thousands strong. In Freiberg I had met four hundred reservists, who had come in excellent form to back the citizen army, but could not proceed further, as they were tired out by their forced march. It seemed obvious that this was a case in which the necessary energy to requisition wagons had been lacking, and that if the bounds of loyalty were transgressed in this matter, the advent of fresh forces would be considerably promoted. I was begged to make my way back at once, and convey the opinion of the provisional government to the people whose acquaintance I had made. My old friend Marschall von Bieberstein immediately proposed to accompany me. I welcomed his offer, as he was an officer of the provisional government, and was consequently more fitted than I was to communicate orders. This man, who had been almost extravagant in his enthusiasm before, was now utterly exhausted by sleeplessness, and unable to emit another word from his hoarse throat. He now made his way with me from the Town Hall to his house in the suburb of Plauen by the devious ways that had been indicated to us, in order to requisition a carriage for our purpose from a coachman he knew, and to bid farewell to his family, from whom he assumed he would in all probability have to separate himself for some time. While we were waiting for the coachman we had tea and supper, talking the while, in a fairly calm and composed manner, with the ladies of the house. We arrived at Freiberg early the following morning, after various adventures, and I set out forthwith to find the leaders of the reservist contingent with whom I was already acquainted. Marschall advised them to requisition horses and carts in the villages wherever they could do so.
When they had all set off in marching order for Dresden, and while I was feeling impelled by my passionate interest in the fate of that city to return to it once more, Marschall conceived the desire to carry his commission further afield, and for this purpose asked to be allowed to leave me. Whereupon I again turned my back on the heights of the Erzgebirge, and was travelling by special coach in the direction of Tharand, when I too was overcome with sleep, and was only awakened by violent shouts and the sound of some one holding a parley with the postillion. On opening my eyes I found, to my astonishment, that the road was filled with armed revolutionaries marching, not towards, but away from Dresden, and some of them were trying to commandeer the coach to relieve their weariness on the way back. ‘What is the matter?’ I cried. ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Home,’ was the reply. ‘It is all over in Dresden. The provincial government is close behind us in that carriage down there.’ I shot out of the coach like a dart, leaving it at the disposal of the tired men, and hurried on, down the steeply sloping road, to meet the ill-fated party. And there I actually found them—Heubner, Bakunin, and Martin, the energetic post-office clerk, the two latter armed with muskets—in a smart hired carriage from Dresden which was coming slowly up the hill. On the box were, as I supposed, the secretaries, while as many as possible of the weary National Guard struggled for seats behind. I hastened to swing myself into the coach, and so came in for a conversation which thereupon took place between the driver, who was also the owner of the coach, and the provisional government. The man was imploring them to spare his carriage, which, he said, was very lightly sprung and quite unequal to carrying such a load; he begged that the people should be told not to seat themselves behind and in front.
But Bakunin remained quite unconcerned, and elected to give me a short account of the retreat from Dresden, which had been successfully achieved without loss. He had had the trees in the newly planted Maximilian Avenue felled early in the morning to form a barricade against a possible flank attack of cavalry, and had been immensely entertained by the lamentations of the inhabitants, who during the process did nothing but bewail their _Scheene Beeme_.[16] All this time our driver’s lamentations over his coach were growing more importunate. Finally he broke into loud sobs and tears, upon which Bakunin, regarding him with positive pleasure, called out: ‘The tears of a Philistine are nectar for the gods.’ He would not vouchsafe him a word, but Heubner and I found the scene tiresome, whereupon he asked me whether we two at least should not get out, as he could not ask it of the others. As a matter of fact, it was high time to leave the coach, as some new contingents of revolutionaries had formed up in rank and file all along the highway to salute the provisional government and receive orders. Heubner strode down the line with great dignity, acquainted the leaders with the state of affairs, and exhorted them to keep their trust in the righteousness of the cause for which so many had shed their blood. All were now to retire to Freiberg, there to await further orders. [16] Saxon corruption of _schöne Bäume_, beautiful trees.—EDITOR. A youngish man of serious mien now stepped forward from the ranks of the rebels to place himself under the special protection of the provisional government. He was a certain Menzdorff, a German Catholic priest whom I had had the advantage of meeting in Dresden. (It was he who, in the course of a significant conversation, had first induced me to read Feuerbach.) He had been dragged along as a prisoner and abominably treated by the Chemnitz municipal guard on this particular march, having originally been the instigator of a demonstration to force that body to take up arms and march to Dresden.
He owed his freedom only to the chance meeting with other better disposed volunteer corps. We saw this Chemnitz town guard ourselves, stationed far away on a hill. They sent representatives to beseech Heubner to tell them how things stood. When they had received the information required, and had been told that the fight would be continued in a determined manner, they invited the provisional government to quarter at Chemnitz. As soon as they rejoined their main body we saw them wheel round and turn back. With many similar interruptions the somewhat disorganised procession reached Freiberg. Here some friends of Heubner’s came to meet him in the streets with the urgent request not to plunge their native place into the misery of desperate street-fighting by establishing the provisional government there. Heubner made no reply to this, but requested Bakunin and myself to accompany him into his house for a consultation. First we had to witness the painful meeting between Heubner and his wife; in a few words he pointed out the gravity and importance of the task assigned to him, reminding her that it was for Germany and the high destiny of his country that he was staking his life. Breakfast was then prepared, and after the meal, during which a fairly cheerful mood prevailed, Heubner made a short speech to Bakunin, speaking quietly but firmly. ‘My dear Bakunin,’ he said (his previous acquaintance with Bakunin was so slight that he did not even know how to pronounce his name), ‘before we decide anything further, I must ask you to state clearly whether your political aim is really the Red Republic, of which they tell me you are a partisan. Tell me frankly, so that I may know if I can rely on your friendship in the future?’ Bakunin explained briefly that he had no scheme for any political form of government, and would not risk his life for any of them. As for his own far-reaching desires and hopes, they had nothing whatever to do with the street-fighting in Dresden and all that this implied for Germany.
He had looked upon the rising in Dresden as a foolish, ludicrous movement until he realised the effect of Heubner’s noble and courageous example. From that moment every political consideration and aim had been put in the background by his sympathy with this heroic attitude, and he had immediately resolved to assist this excellent man with all the devotion and energy of a friend. He knew, of course, that he belonged to the so-called moderate party, of whose political future he was not able to form an opinion, as he had not profited much by his opportunities of studying the position of the various parties in Germany. Heubner declared himself satisfied by this reply, and proceeded to ask Bakunin’s opinion of the present state of things—whether it would not be conscientious and reasonable to dismiss the men and give up a struggle which might be considered hopeless. In reply Bakunin insisted, with his usual calm assurance, that whoever else threw up the sponge, Heubner must certainly not do so. He had been the first member of the provisional government, and it was he who had given the call to arms. The call had been obeyed, and hundreds of lives had been sacrificed; to scatter the people again would look as if these sacrifices had been made to idle folly. Even if they were the only two left, they still ought not to forsake their posts. If they went under their lives might be forfeit, but their honour must remain unsullied, so that a similar appeal in the future might not drive every one to despair. This was quite enough for Heubner. He at once made out a summons for the election of a representative assembly for Saxony, to be held at Chemnitz. He thought that, with the assistance of the populace and of the numerous insurgent bands who were arriving from all quarters, he would be able to hold the town as the headquarters of a provisional government until the general situation in Germany had become more settled.
In the midst of these discussions, Stephan Born walked into the room to report that he had brought the armed bands right into Freiberg, in good order and without any losses. This young man was a compositor who had contributed greatly to Heubner’s peace of mind during the last three days in Dresden by taking over the chief command. His simplicity of manner made a very encouraging impression on us, particularly when we heard his report. When, however, Heubner asked whether he would undertake to defend Freiberg against the troops which might be expected to attack at any moment, he declared that this was an experienced officer’s job, and that he himself was no soldier and knew nothing of strategy. Under these circumstances it seemed better, if only to gain time, to fall back on the more thickly populated town of Chemnitz. The first thing to be done, however, was to see that the revolutionaries, who were assembled in large numbers at Freiberg, were properly cared for, and Born went off immediately to make preliminary arrangements. Heubner also took leave of us, and went to refresh his tired brain by an hour’s sleep. I was left alone on the sofa with Bakunin, who soon fell towards me, overcome by irresistible drowsiness, and dropped the terrific weight of his head on to my shoulder. As I saw that he would not wake if I shook off this burden, I pushed him aside with some difficulty, and took leave both of the sleeper and of Heubner’s house; for I wished to see for myself, as I had done for many days past, what course these extraordinary events were taking. I therefore went to the Town Hall, where I found the townspeople entertaining to the best of their ability a blustering horde of excited revolutionaries both within and without the walls. To my surprise, I found Heubner there in the full swing of work. I thought he was asleep at home, but the idea of leaving the people even for an hour without a counsellor had driven away all thought of rest.
He had lost no time in superintending the organisation of a sort of commandant’s office, and was again occupied with drafting and signing documents in the midst of the uproar that raged on all sides. It was not long before Bakunin too put in an appearance, principally in search of a good officer—who was not, however, forthcoming. The commandant of a large contingent from the Vogtland, an oldish man, raised Bakunin’s hopes by the impassioned energy of his speeches, and he would have had him appointed commandant-general on the spot. But it seemed as if any real decision were impossible in that frenzy and confusion, and as the only hope of mastering it seemed to be in reaching Chemnitz, Heubner gave the order to march on towards that town as soon as every one had had food. Once this was settled, I told my friends I should go on in advance of their column to Chemnitz, where I should find them again next day; for I longed to be quit of this chaos. I actually caught the coach, the departure of which was fixed for that time, and obtained a seat in it. But the revolutionaries were just marching off on the same road, and we were told that we must wait until they had passed to avoid being caught in the whirlpool. This meant considerable delay, and for a long while I watched the peculiar bearing of the patriots as they marched out. I noticed in particular a Vogtland regiment, whose marching step was fairly orthodox, following the beat of a drummer who tried to vary the monotony of his instrument in an artistic manner by hitting the wooden frame alternately with the drumhead. The unpleasant rattling tone thus produced reminded me in ghostly fashion of the rattling of the skeletons’ bones in the dance round the gallows by night which Berlioz had brought home to my imagination with such terrible realism in his performance of the last movement of his Sinfonie Fantastique in Paris. Suddenly the desire seized me to look up the friends I had left behind, and travel to Chemnitz in their company if possible.
I found they had quitted the Town Hall, and on reaching Heubner’s house I was told that he was asleep. I therefore went back to the coach, which, however, was still putting off its departure, as the road was blocked with troops. I walked nervously up and down for some time, then, losing faith in the journey by coach, I went back again to Heubner’s house to offer myself definitely as a travelling companion. But Heubner and Bakunin had already left home, and I could find no traces of them. In desperation I returned once more to the coach, and found it by this time really ready to start. After various delays and adventures it brought me late at night to Chemnitz, where I got out and betook myself to the nearest inn. At five o’clock the next morning I got up (after a few hours’ sleep) and set out to find my brother-in-law Wolfram’s house, which was about a quarter of an hour’s walk from the town. On the way I asked a sentinel of the town guard whether he knew anything about the arrival of the provisional government. ‘Provisional government?’ was the reply. ‘Why, it’s all up with that.’ I did not understand him, nor was I able to learn anything about the state of things when I first reached the house of my relatives, for my brother-in-law had been sent into the town as special constable. It was only on his return home, lute in the afternoon, that I heard what had taken place in one hotel at Chemnitz while I had been resting in another inn. Heubner, Bakunin, and the man called Martin, whom I have mentioned already, had, it seemed, arrived before me in a hackney-coach at the gates of Chemnitz. On being asked for their names Heubner had announced himself in a tone of authority, and had bidden the town councillors come to him at a certain hotel. They had no sooner reached the hotel than they all three collapsed from excessive fatigue.
Suddenly the police broke into the room and arrested them in the name of the local government, upon which they only begged to have a few hours’ quiet sleep, pointing out that flight was out of the question in their present condition. I heard further that they had been removed to Altenburg under a strong military escort. My brother-in-law was obliged to confess that the Chemnitz municipal guard, which had been forced to start for Dresden much against its will, and had resolved at the very outset to place itself at the disposal of the royal forces on arriving there, had deceived Heubner by inviting him to Chemnitz, and had lured him into the trap. They had reached Chemnitz long before Heubner, and had taken over the guard at the gates with the object of seeing him arrive and of preparing for his arrest at once. My brother-in-law had been very anxious about me too, as he had been told in furious tones by the leaders of the town guard that I had been seen in close association with the revolutionaries. He thought it a wonderful intervention of Providence that I had not arrived at Chemnitz with them and gone to the same inn, in which case their fate would certainly have been mine. The recollection of my escape from almost certain death in duels with the most experienced swordsmen in my student days flashed across me like a flash of lightning. This last terrible experience made such an impression on me that I was incapable of breathing a word in connection with what had happened. My brother-in-law, in response to urgent appeals—from my wife in particular, who was much concerned for my personal safety—undertook to convey me to Altenburg in his carriage by night. From there I continued my journey by coach to Weimar, where I had originally planned to spend my holidays, little thinking that I should arrive by such devious ways.
The dreamy unreality of my state of mind at this time is best explained by the apparent seriousness with which, on meeting Liszt again, I at once began to discuss what seemed to be the sole topic of any real interest to him in connection with me—the forthcoming revival of Tannhäuser at Weimar. I found it very difficult to confess to this friend that I had not left Dresden in the regulation way for a conductor of the royal opera. To tell the truth, I had a very hazy conception of the relation in which I stood to the law of my country (in the narrow sense). Had I done anything criminal in the eye of the law or not? I found it impossible to come to any conclusion about it. Meanwhile, alarming news of the terrible conditions in Dresden continued to pour into Weimar. Genast, the stage manager, in particular, aroused great excitement by spreading the report that Röckel, who was well known at Weimar, had been guilty of arson. Liszt must soon have gathered from my conversation, in which I did not take the trouble to dissimulate, that I too was suspiciously connected with these terrible events, though my attitude with regard to them misled him for some time. For I was not by any means prepared to proclaim myself a combatant in the recent fights, and that for reasons quite other than would have seemed valid in the eyes of the law. My friend was therefore encouraged in his delusion by the unpremeditated effect of my attitude. When we met at the house of Princess Caroline of Wittgenstein, to whom I had been introduced the year before when she paid her flying visit to Dresden, we were able to hold stimulating conversations on all sorts of artistic topics. One afternoon, for instance, a lively discussion sprang up from a description I had given of a tragedy to be entitled Jesus of Nazareth. Liszt maintained a discreet silence after I had finished, whereas the Princess protested vigorously against my proposal to bring such a subject on to the stage.
From the lukewarm attempt I made to support the paradoxical theories I had put forward, I realised the state of my mind at that time. Although it was not very evident to onlookers, I had been, and still was, shaken to the very depths of my being by my recent experiences. In due course an orchestral rehearsal of Tannhäuser took place, which in various ways stimulated the artist in me afresh. Liszt’s conducting, though mainly concerned with the musical rather than the dramatic side, filled me for the first time with the flattering warmth of emotion roused by the consciousness of being understood by another mind in full sympathy with my own. At the same time I was able, in spite of my dreamy condition, to observe critically the standard of capacity exhibited by the singers and their chorus-master. After the rehearsal I, together with the musical director, Stohr, and Götze the singer, accepted Liszt’s invitation to a simple dinner, at a different inn from the one where he lived. I thus had occasion to take alarm at a trait in his character which was entirely new to me. After being stirred up to a certain pitch of excitement his mood became positively alarming, and he almost gnashed his teeth in a passion of fury directed against a certain section of society which had also aroused my deepest indignation. I was strongly affected by this strange experience with this wonderful man, but I was unable to see the association of ideas which had led to his terrible outburst. I was therefore left in a state of amazement, while Liszt had to recover during the night from a violent attack of nerves which his excitement had produced. Another surprise was in store for me the next morning, when I found my friend fully equipped for a journey to Karlsruhe—the circumstances which made it necessary being absolutely incomprehensible to me. Liszt invited Director Stohr and myself to accompany him as far as Eisenach.
On our way there we were stopped by Beaulieu, the Lord Chamberlain, who wished to know whether I was prepared to be received by the Grand Duchess of Weimar, a sister of the Emperor Nicolas, at Eisenach castle. As my excuse on the score of unsuitable travelling costume was not admitted, Liszt accepted in my name, and I really met with a surprisingly kind reception that evening from the Grand Duchess, who chatted with me in the friendliest way, and introduced me to her chamberlain with all due ceremony. Liszt maintained afterwards that his noble patroness had been informed that I should be wanted by the authorities in Dresden within the next few days, and had therefore hastened to make my personal acquaintance at once, knowing that it would compromise her too heavily later on. Liszt continued his journey from Eisenach, leaving me to be entertained and looked after by Stohr and the musical director Kuhmstedt, a diligent and skilful master of counterpoint with whom I paid my first visit to the Wartburg, which had not then been restored. I was filled with strange musings as to my fate when I visited this castle. Here I was actually on the point of entering, for the first time, the building which was so full of meaning for me; here, too, I had to tell myself that the days of my further sojourn in Germany were numbered. And in fact the news from Dresden, when we returned to Weimar the next day, was serious indeed. Liszt, on his return on the third day, found a letter from my wife, who had not dared to write direct to me. She reported that the police had searched my house in Dresden, to which she had returned, and that she had, moreover been warned on no account to allow me to return to that city, as a warrant had been taken out against me, and I was shortly to be served with a writ and arrested. Liszt, who was now solely concerned for my personal safety, called in a friend who had some experience of law, to consider what should be done to rescue me from the danger that threatened me.
Von Watzdorf, the minister whom I had already visited, had been of opinion that I should, if required, submit quietly to being taken to Dresden, and that the journey would be made in a respectable private carriage. On the other hand, reports which had reached us of the brutal way in which the Prussian troops in Dresden had gone to work in applying the state of siege were of so alarming a nature that Liszt and his friends in council urged my speedy departure from Weimar, where it would be impossible to protect me. But I insisted on taking leave of my wife, whose anxiety was great, before leaving Germany, and begged to be allowed to stay a little longer at least in the neighbourhood of Weimar. This was taken into consideration, and Professor Siebert suggested my taking temporary shelter with a friendly steward at the village of Magdala, which was three hours distant. I drove there the following morning to introduce myself to this kind steward and protector as Professor Werder from Berlin, who, with a letter of recommendation from Professor Siebert, had come to turn his financial studies to practical account in helping to administer these estates. Here in rural seclusion I spent three days, entertainment of a peculiar nature being provided by the meeting of a popular assembly, which consisted of the remainder of the contingent of revolutionaries which had marched off towards Dresden and had now returned in disorder. I listened with curious feelings, amounting almost to contempt, to the speeches on this occasion, which were of every kind and description. On the second day of my stay my host’s wife came back from Weimar (where it was market-day) full of a curious tale: the composer of an opera which was being performed there on that very day had been obliged to leave Weimar suddenly because the warrant for his arrest had arrived from Dresden. My host, who had been let into my secret by Professor Seibert, asked playfully what his name was.
As his wife did not seem to know, he came to her assistance with the suggestion that perhaps it was Röckel whose name was familiar at Weimar. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Röckel, that was his name, quite right.’ My host laughed loudly, and said that he would not be so stupid as to let them catch him, in spite of his opera. At last, on 22nd May, my birthday, Minna actually arrived at Magdala. She had hastened to Weimar on receiving my letter, and had proceeded from there according to instructions, bent on persuading me at all costs to flee the country immediately and for good. No attempt to raise her to the level of my own mood was successful; she persisted in regarding me as an ill-advised, inconsiderate person who had plunged both himself and her into the most terrible situation. It had been arranged that I should meet her the next evening in the house of Professor Wolff at Jena to take a last farewell. She was to go by way of Weimar, while I took the footpath from Magdala. I started accordingly on my walk of about six hours, and came over the plateau into the little university town (which now received me hospitably for the first time) at sunset. I found my wife again at the house of Professor Wolff, who, thanks to Liszt, was already my friend, and with the addition of a certain Professor Widmann another conference was held on the subject of my further escape. A writ was actually out against me for being strongly suspected of participation in the Dresden rising, and I could not under any circumstances depend on a safe refuge in any of the German federal states. Liszt insisted on my going to Paris, where I could find a new field for my work, while Widmann advised me not to go by the direct route through Frankfort and Baden, as the rising was still in full swing there, and the police would certainly exercise praiseworthy vigilance over incoming travellers with suspicious-looking passports.
The way through Bavaria would be the safest, as all was quiet there again; I could then make for Switzerland, and the journey to Paris from there could be engineered without any danger. As I needed a passport for the journey, Professor Widmann offered me his own, which had been issued at Tubingen and had not been brought up to date. My wife was quite in despair, and the parting from her caused me real pain. I set off in the mail-coach and travelled, without further hindrance, through many towns (amongst them Rudolstadt, a place full of memories for me) to the Bavarian frontier. From there I continued my journey by mail-coach straight to Lindau. At the gates I, together with the other passengers, was asked for my passport. I passed the night in a state of strange, feverish excitement, which lasted until the departure of the steamer on Lake Constance early in the morning. My mind was full of the Swabian dialect, as spoken by Professor Widmann, with whose passport I was travelling. I pictured to myself my dealings with the Bavarian police should I have to converse with them in accordance with the above-mentioned irregularities in that document. A prey to feverish unrest, I spent the whole night trying to perfect myself in the Swabian dialect, but, as I was amused to find, without the smallest success. I had braced myself to meet the crucial moment early the next morning, when the policeman came into my room and, not knowing to whom the passports belonged, gave me three at random to choose from. With joy in my heart I seized my own, and dismissed the dreaded messenger in the most friendly way. Once on board the steamer I realised with true satisfaction that I had now stepped on to Swiss territory. It was a lovely spring morning; across the broad lake I could gaze at the Alpine landscape as it spread itself before my eyes. When I stepped on to Republican soil at Rorschach, I employed the first moments in writing a few lines home to tell of my safe arrival in Switzerland and my deliverance from all danger.
The coach drive through the pleasant country of St. Gall to Zürich cheered me up wonderfully, and when I drove down from Oberstrass into Zürich that evening, the last day in May, at six o’clock, and saw for the first time the Glarner Alps that encircle the lake gleaming in the sunset, I at once resolved, though without being fully conscious of it, to avoid everything that could prevent my settling here. I had been the more willing to accept my friends’ suggestion to take the Swiss route to Paris, as I knew I should find an old acquaintance, Alexander Muller, at Zürich. I hoped with his help to obtain a passport to France, as I was anxious not to arrive there as a political refugee. I had been on very friendly terms with Muller once upon a time at Wurzburg. He had been settled at Zürich for a long time as a teacher of music; this I learned from a pupil of his, Wilhelm Baumgartner, who had called on me in Dresden some years back to bring me a greeting from this old friend. On that occasion I entrusted the pupil with a copy of the score of Tannhäuser for his master, by way of remembrance, and this kind attention had not fallen on barren soil: Muller and Baumgartner, whom I visited forthwith, introduced me at once to Jacob Sulzer and Franz Hagenbuch, two cantonal secretaries who were the most likely, among all their good friends, to compass the immediate fulfilment of my desire. These two people, who had been joined by a few intimates, received me with such respectful curiosity and sympathy that I felt at home with them at once. The great assurance and moderation with which they commented on the persecutions which had overtaken me, as seen from their usual simple republican standpoint, opened to me a conception of civil life which seemed to lift me to an entirely new sphere.
I felt so safe and protected here, whereas in my own country I had, without quite realising it, come to be considered a criminal owing to the peculiar connection between my disgust at the public attitude towards art and the general political disturbances. To prepossess the two secretaries entirely in my favour (one of them, Sulzer, had enjoyed an excellent classical education), 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 Zürich. 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, schöner Götterfunken[17] from the Ninth Symphony being played, as it were, on deep bass instruments. [17] See note on page 486. 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 against the once dreaded socialist propaganda, was exerting itself vigorously to regain the public confidence by its almost insulting pomp. I had gone, as it were, mechanically into Schlesinger’s music-shop, where a successor was now installed—a much more pronounced type of Jew named Brandus, of a very dirty appearance. The only person there to give me a friendly welcome was the old clerk, Monsieur Henri.
After I had talked to him in loud tones for some time, as the shop was apparently empty, he at length asked me with some embarrassment whether I had not seen my master (_votre maître_) Meyerbeer. ‘Is Monsieur Meyerbeer here?’ I asked. ‘Certainly,’ was the even more embarrassed reply; ‘quite near, over there behind the desk.’ And, sure enough, as I walked across to the desk Meyerbeer came out, covered with confusion. He smiled and made some excuse about pressing proof-sheets. He had been hiding there quietly for over ten minutes since first hearing my voice. I had had enough after my strange encounter with this apparition. It recalled so many things affecting myself which reflected suspicion on the man, in particular the significance of his behaviour towards me in Berlin on the last occasion. However, as I had now nothing more to do with him, I greeted him with a certain easy gaiety induced by the regret I felt at seeing his manifest confusion on becoming cognisant of my arrival in Paris. He took it for granted that I should again seek my fortune there, and seemed much surprised when I assured him, on the contrary, that the idea of having any work there was odious to me. ‘But Liszt published such a brilliant article about you in the _Journal des Débats_,’ he said. ‘Ah,’ I replied, ‘it really had not occurred to me that the enthusiastic devotion of a friend should be regarded as a mutual speculation.’ ‘But the article made a sensation. It is incredible that you should not seek to make any profit out of it.’ This offensive meddlesomeness roused me to protest to Meyerbeer with some violence that I was concerned with anything rather than with the production of artistic work, particularly just at that time when the course of events seemed to indicate that the whole world was undergoing a reaction. ‘But what do you expect to get out of the revolution?’ he replied. ‘Are you going to write scores for the barricades?’ Whereupon I assured him that I was not thinking of writing any scores at all.
We parted, obviously without having arrived at a mutual understanding. In the street I was also stopped by Moritz Schlesinger, who, being equally under the influence of Liszt’s brilliant article, evidently considered me a perfect prodigy. He too thought I must be counting on making a hit in Paris, and was sure that I had a very good chance of doing so. ‘Will you undertake my business?’ I asked him. ‘I have no money. Do you really think the performance of an opera by an unknown composer can be anything but a matter of money?’ ‘You are quite right,’ said Moritz, and left me on the spot. I turned from these disagreeable encounters in the plague-stricken capital of the world to inquire the fate of my Dresden companions, for some of those with whom I was intimate had also reached Paris, when I called on Desplechins, who had painted the scenery for Tannhäuser. I found Semper there, who had, like myself, been deposited in this city. We met again with no little pleasure, although we could not help smiling at our grotesque situation. Semper had retired from the battle when the famous barricade, which he in his capacity of architect kept under close observation, had been surrounded. (He thought it impossible for it to be captured.) All the same, he considered that he had exposed himself quite sufficiently to make it state of siege and were occupying Dresden. He considered himself lucky as a native of Holstein to be dependent, not on the German, but on the Danish government for a passport, as this had helped him to reach Paris without difficulty. When I expressed my real and heartfelt regret at the turn of affairs which had torn him from a professional undertaking on which he had just started—the completion of the Dresden Museum—he refused to take it too seriously, saying it had given him a great deal of worry. In spite of our trying situation, it was with Semper that I spent the only bright hours of my stay in Paris. We were soon joined by another refugee, young Heine, who had once wished to paint my Lohengrin scenery.
He had no qualms about his future, for his master Desplechins was willing to give him employment. I alone felt I had been pitched quite aimlessly into Paris. I had a passionate desire to leave this cholera-laden, atmosphere, and Belloni offered me an opportunity which I promptly and joyfully seized. He invited me to follow himself and his family to a country place near La Ferte-sous-Jouarre, where I could be refreshed by pure air and absolute quiet, and wait for a change for the better in my position. I made the short journey to Rueil after another week in Paris, and took for the time being a poor lodging (one room, built with recesses) in the house of Monsieur Raphael, a wine merchant, close by the village mairie where the Belloni family were staying. Here I waited further developments. During the period when all news from Germany ceased I tried to occupy myself as far as possible with reading. After going through Proudhon’s writings, and in particular his De la propriete, in such a manner as to glean comfort for my situation in curiously divers ways, I entertained myself for a considerable time with Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins, a most alluring and attractive work. One day Belloni brought me news of the unfortunate rising in Paris, which had been attempted on the 13th June by the Republicans under Ledru-Rollin against the provisional government, which was then in the full tide of reaction. Great as was the indignation with which the news was received by my host and the mayor of the place (a relative of his, at whose table we ate our modest daily meal), it made, on the whole, little impression on me, as my attention was still fixed in great agitation on the events which were taking place on the Rhine, and particularly on the grand-duchy of Baden, which had been made forfeit to a provisional government. When, however, the news reached me from this quarter also that the Prussians had succeeded in subduing a movement which had not at first seemed hopeless, I felt extraordinarily downcast.
I was compelled to consider my position carefully, and the necessity of conquering my difficulties helped to allay the excitement to which I was a prey. The letters from my Weimar friends, as well as those from my wife, now brought me completely to my senses. The former expressed themselves very curtly about my behaviour with regard to recent events. The opinion was, that for the moment there would be nothing for me to do, and especially not in Dresden, or at the grand-ducal court, ‘as one could not very well knock at battered doors’; ‘on ne frappe pas a des portes enfoncees’ (Princess von Wittgenstein to Belloni). I did not know what to reply, for I had never dreamt of expecting anything to come from their intervening on my behalf in that quarter; consequently I was quite satisfied that they sent me temporarily financial assistance. With this money I made up my mind to leave for Zürich and ask Alex Muller to give me shelter for a while, as his house was sufficiently large to accommodate a guest. My saddest moment came when, after a long silence, I at last received a letter from my wife. She wrote that she could not dream of living with me again; that after I had so unscrupulously thrown away a connection and position, the like of which would never again present itself to me, no woman could reasonably be expected to take any further interest in my future enterprises. I fully appreciated my wife’s unfortunate position; I could in no way assist her, except by advising her to sell our Dresden furniture, and by making an appeal on her behalf to my relatives in Leipzig. Until then I had been able to think more lightly of the misery of her position, simply because I had imagined her to be more deeply in sympathy with what agitated me. Often during the recent extraordinary events I had even believed that she understood my feelings.
Now, however, she had disillusioned me on this point: she could see in me no more than what the public saw, and the one redeeming point of her severe judgment was that she excused my behaviour on the score that I was reckless. After I had begged Liszt to do what he could for my wife, I soon began to regard her unexpected behaviour with more equanimity. In reply to her announcement that she would not write to me again for the present, I said that I had also resolved to spare her all further anxiety about my very doubtful fate, by ceasing from communicating with her. I surveyed the panorama of our long years of association critically in my mind’s eye, beginning with that first stormy year of our married life, that had been so full of sorrow. Our youthful days of worry and care in Paris had undoubtedly been of benefit to us both. The courage and patience with which she had faced our difficulties, while I on my part had tried to end them by dint of hard work, had linked us together with bonds of iron. Minna was rewarded for all these privations by Dresden successes, and more especially by the highly enviable position I had held there. Her position as wife of the conductor (Frau Kapellmeisterin) had brought her the fulfilment of her dearest wishes, and all those things which conspired to make my work in this official post so intolerable to me, were to her no more than so many threats directed against her smug content. The course I had adopted with regard to Tannhäuser had already made her doubtful of my success at the theatres, and had robbed her of all courage and confidence in our future. The more I deviated from the path which she regarded as the only profitable one, due partly to the change of my views (which I grew ever less willing to communicate to her), and partly to the modification in my attitude towards the stage, the more she retreated from that position of close fellowship with me which she had enjoyed in former years, and which she thought herself justified in connecting in some way with my successes.
She looked upon my conduct with regard to the Dresden catastrophe as the outcome of this deviation from the right path, and attributed it to the influence of unscrupulous persons (particularly the unfortunate Röckel), who were supposed to have dragged me with them to ruin, by appealing to my vanity. Deeper than all these disagreements, however, which, after all, were concerned only with external circumstances, was the consciousness of our fundamental incompatibility, which to me had become ever more and more apparent since the day of our reconciliation. From the very beginning we had had scenes of the most violent description: never once after these frequent quarrels had she admitted herself in the wrong or tried to be friends again. The necessity of speedily restoring our domestic peace, as well as my conviction (confirmed by every one of her extravagant outbursts) that, in view of the great disparity of our characters and especially of our educations, it devolved upon me to prevent such scenes by observing great caution in my behaviour, always led me to take the entire blame for what had happened upon myself, and to mollify Minna by showing her that I was sorry. Unfortunately, and to my intense grief, I was forced to recognise that by acting in this way I lost all my power over her affections, and especially over her character. Now we stood in a position in which I could not possibly resort to the same means of reconciliation, for it would have meant my being inconsistent in all my views and actions. And then I found myself confronted by such hardness in the woman whom I had spoilt by my leniency, that it was out of the question to expect her to acknowledge the injustice done to myself.
Suffice it to say that the wreck of my married life had contributed not inconsiderably to the ruin of my position in Dresden, and to the careless manner in which I treated it, for instead of finding help, strength, and consolation at home, I found my wife unwittingly conspiring against me, in league with all the other hostile circumstances which then beset me. After I had got over the first shock of her heartless behaviour, I was absolutely clear about this. I remember that I did not suffer any great sorrow, but that on the contrary, with the conviction of being now quite helpless, an almost exalted calm came over me when I realised that up to the present my life had been built on a foundation of sand and nothing more. At all events, the fact that I stood absolutely alone did much towards restoring my peace of mind, and in my distress I now found strength and comfort even in the fact of my dire poverty. At last assistance arrived from Weimar. I accepted it eagerly, and it was the means of extricating me from my present useless life and stranded hopes. My next move was to find a place of refuge—one, however, which had but little attraction for me, seeing that in it there was not the slightest hope of my being able to make any further headway in the paths along which I had hitherto progressed. This refuge was Zürich, a town devoid of all art in the public sense, and where for the first time I met simple-hearted people who knew nothing about me as a musician, but who, as it appeared, felt drawn towards me by the power of my personality alone. I arrived at Muller’s house and asked him to let me have a room, at the same time giving him what remained of my capital, namely twenty francs. I quickly discovered that my old friend was embarrassed by my perfectly open confidence in him, and that he was at his wit’s end to know what to do with me. I soon gave up the large room containing a grand piano, which he had allotted to me on the impulse of the moment, and retired to a modest little bedroom.
The meals were my great trial, not because I was fastidious, but because I could not digest thorn. Outside my friend’s house, on the contrary, I enjoyed what, considering the habits of the locality, was the most luxurious reception. The same young men who had been so kind to me on my first journey through Zürich again showed themselves anxious to be continually in my company, and this was especially the case with one young fellow called Jakob Sulzer. He had to be thirty years of age before he was entitled to become a member of the Zürich government, and he therefore still had several years to wait. In spite of his youth, however, the impression he made on all those with whom he came in contact was that of a man of riper years, whose character was formed. When I was asked long afterwards whether I had ever met a man who, morally speaking, was the beau-ideal of real character and uprightness, I could, on reflection, think of none other than this newly gained friend, Jakob Sulzer. He owed his early appointment as permanent Cantonal Secretary (Staatsschreiber), one of the most excellent government posts in the canton of Zürich, to the recently returned liberal party, led by Alfred Escher. As this party could not employ the more experienced members of the older conservative side in the public offices, their policy was to choose exceptionally gifted young men for these positions. Sulzer showed extraordinary promise, and their choice accordingly soon lighted on him. He had only just returned from the Berlin and Bonn universities with the intention of establishing himself as professor of philology at the university in his native town, when he was made a member of the new government. To fit himself for his post he had to stay in Geneva for six months to perfect himself in the French language, which he had neglected during his philological studies. He was quick-witted and industrious, as well as independent and firm, and he never allowed himself to be swayed by any party tactics.
Consequently he rose very rapidly to high positions in the government, to which he rendered valuable and important services, first as Minister of Finance, a post he held for many years, and later with particular distinction as member of the School Federation. His unexpected acquaintance with me seemed to place him in a sort of dilemma; from the philological and classical studies which he had entered upon of his own choice, he suddenly found himself torn away in the most bewildering manner by this unexpected summons from the government. It almost seemed as if his meeting with me had made him regret having accepted the appointment. As he was a person of great culture, my poem, Siegfried’s Death, naturally revealed to him my knowledge of German antiquity. He had also studied this subject, but with greater philological accuracy than I could possibly have aspired to. When, later on, he became acquainted with my manner of writing music, this peculiarly serious and reserved man became so thoroughly interested in my sphere of art, so far removed from his own field of labour, that, as he himself confessed, he felt it his duty to fight against these disturbing influences by being intentionally brusque and curt with me. In the beginning of my stay in Zürich, however, he delighted in being led some distance astray in the realms of art. The old-fashioned official residence of the first Cantonal Secretary was often the scene of unique gatherings, composed of people such as I would be sure to attract. It might even be said that these social functions occurred rather more frequently than was advisable for the reputation of a civil servant of this little philistine state. What attracted the musician Baumgartner more particularly to these meetings was the product of Sulzer’s vineyards in Winterthur, to which our hosts treated his guests with the greatest liberality.
When in my moods of mad exuberance I gave vent in dithyrambic effusions to my most extreme views on art and life, my listeners 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 Zürich 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. 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 Zürich 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 Zürich 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 Zürich. 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. After I had spent two remarkable summer months in this wild and extraordinary fashion, I at last received reassuring news of Minna, who had remained in Dresden. Although her manner of taking leave of me had been both harsh and wounding, I could not bring myself to believe I had completely parted from her. In a letter I wrote to one of her relations, and which I presumed they would forward, I made sympathetic inquiries about her, while I had already done all that lay in my power, through repeated appeals to Liszt, to ensure her being well cared for. I now received a direct reply, which, in addition to the fact that it testified to the vigour and activity with which she had fought her difficulties, at the same time showed me that she earnestly desired to be reunited with me. It was almost in terms of contempt that she expressed her grave doubts as to the possibility of my being able to make a living in Zürich, but she added that, inasmuch as she was my wife, she wished to give me another chance. She also seemed to take it for granted that I intended making Zürich only our temporary home, and that I would do my utmost to promote my career as a composer of opera in Paris. Whereupon she announced her intention of arriving at Rorschach in Switzerland on a certain date in September of that year, in the company of the little dog Peps, the parrot Papo, and her so-called sister Nathalie. After having engaged two rooms for our new home, I now prepared to set out on foot for St. Gall and Rorschach through the lovely and celebrated Toggenburg and Appenzell, and felt very touched after all when the peculiar family, which consisted half of pet animals, landed at the harbour of Rorschach. I must honestly confess that the little dog and the bird made me very happy.
My wife at once threw cold water on my emotions, however, by declaring that in the event of my behaving badly again she was ready to return to Dresden any moment, and that she had numerous friends there, who would be glad to protect and succour her if she were forced to carry out her threat. Be this as it may, one look at her convinced me how greatly she had aged in this short time, and how much I ought to pity her, and this feeling succeeded in banishing all bitterness from my heart. I did my utmost to give her confidence and to make her believe that our present misfortunes were but momentary. This was no easy task, as she would constantly compare the diminutive aspect of the town of Zürich with the more noble majesty of Dresden, and seemed to feel bitterly humiliated. The friends whom I introduced to her found no favour in her eyes. She looked upon the Cantonal Secretary, Sulzer, as a ‘mere town clerk who would not be of any importance in. Germany’; and the wife of my host Muller absolutely disgusted her when, in answer to Minna’s complaints about my terrible position, she replied that my greatness lay in the very fact of my having faced it. Then again Minna appeased me by tolling me of the expected arrival of some of my Dresden belongings, which she thought would be indispensable to our new home. 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 Zürich 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 Zürich 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 Zürich. 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 Zürich 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 have seconded and rewarded similar efforts on my part. Her one and only ideal for me was that, by hook or by crook, and with a total disregard of all artistic scruples, I should make a brilliant reputation for myself in Paris. While we were both absolutely at a loss to discover whence we should obtain the necessary funds for our journey to Paris and our sojourn there, I again plunged into my philosophical study of art, as being the only sphere still left open to me. Harrassed by the cares of a terrible struggle for existence, I wrote the whole of Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft in the chilly atmosphere of a sunless little room on the ground floor during the months of November and December of that year. Minna had no objection to this occupation when I told her of the success of my first pamphlet, and the hope I had of receiving even better pay for this more extensive work. Thus for a while I enjoyed comparative peace, although in my heart a spirit of unrest had begun to reign, thanks to my growing acquaintance with Feuerbach’s works. I had always had an inclination to fathom the depths of philosophy, just as I had been led by the mystic influence of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to search the deepest recesses of music. My first efforts at satisfying this longing had failed. None of the Leipzig professors had succeeded in fascinating me with their lectures on fundamental philosophy and logic.
I had procured Schelling’s work, Transcendental Idealism, recommended to me by Gustav Schlesinger, a friend of Laube’s, but it was in vain that I racked my brains to try and make something out of the first pages, and I always returned to my Ninth Symphony. During the latter part of my stay in Dresden I had returned to these old studies, the longing for which suddenly revived within me, and to these I added the deeper historical studies which had always fascinated me. As an introduction to philosophy I now chose Hegel’s Philosophy of History. A good deal of this impressed me deeply, and it now seemed as if I should ultimately penetrate into the Holy of Holies along this path. The more incomprehensible many of his speculative conclusions appeared, the more I felt myself desirous of probing the question of the ‘Absolute’ and everything connected therewith to the core. For I so admired Hegel’s powerful mind that it seemed to me he was the very keystone of all philosophical thought. The revolution intervened; the practical tendencies of a social reconstruction distracted my attention, and as I have already stated, it was a German Catholic priest and political agitator (formerly a divinity student named Menzdorff, who used to wear a Calabrian hat)[18] who drew my attention to ‘the only real philosopher of modern times,’ Ludwig Feuerbach. My new Zürich friend, the piano teacher, Wilhelm Baumgartner, made me a present of Feuerbach’s book on Tod und Unsterblichkeit (‘Death and Immortality’). The well-known and stirring lyrical style of the author greatly fascinated me as a layman. The intricate questions which he propounds in this book as if they were being discussed for the first time by him, and which he treats in a charmingly exhaustive manner, had often occupied my mind since the very first days of my acquaintance with Lehrs in Paris, just as they occupy the mind of every imaginative and serious man.
With me, however, this was not lasting, and I had contented myself with the poetic suggestions on these important subjects which appear here and there in the works of our great poets. [18] A broad-rimmed, tall, white felt hat, tapering to a point, originally worn by the inhabitants of Calabria, and in 1848 a sign of Republicanism.—EDITOR. The frankness with which Feuerbach explains his views on these interesting questions, in the more mature parts of his book, pleased me as much by their tragic as by their social-radical tendencies. It seemed right that the only true immortality should be that of sublime deeds and great works of art. It was more difficult to sustain any interest in Das Wesen des Christenthums (‘The Essence of Christianity’) by the same author, for it was impossible whilst reading this work not to become conscious, however involuntarily, of the prolix and unskilful manner in which he dilates on the simple and fundamental idea, namely, religion explained from a purely subjective and psychological point of view. Nevertheless, from that day onward I always regarded Feuerbach as the ideal exponent of the radical release of the individual from the thraldom of accepted notions, founded on the belief in authority. The initiated will therefore not wonder that I dedicated my Kunstwerk der Zukunft to Feuerbach and addressed its preface to him. My friend Sulzer, a thorough disciple of Hegel, was very sorry to see me so interested in Feuerbach, whom he did not even recognise as a philosopher at all. He said that the best thing that Feuerbach had done for me was that he had been the means of awakening my ideas, although he himself had none. But what had really induced me to attach so much importance to Feuerbach was the conclusion by means of which he had seceded from his master Hegel, to wit, that the best philosophy was to have no philosophy—a theory which greatly simplified what I had formerly considered a very terrifying study—and secondly, that only that was real which could be ascertained by the senses.
The fact that he proclaimed what we call ‘spirit’ to be an aesthetic perception of our senses, together with his statement concerning the futility of philosophy—these were the two things in him which rendered me such useful assistance in my conceptions of an all-embracing work of art, of a perfect drama which should appeal to the simplest and most purely human emotions at the very moment when it approached its fulfilment as Kunstwerk der Zukunft. It must have been this which Sulzer had in his mind when he spoke deprecatingly of Feuerbach’s influence over me. At all events, after a while I certainly could not return to his works, and I remember that his newly published book, Uber das Wesen der Religion (‘Lectures on the Essence of Religion’), scared me to such an extent by the dullness of its title alone, that when Herwegh opened it for my benefit, I closed it with a bang under his very nose. At that time I was working with great enthusiasm upon the draft of a connected essay, and was delighted one day to receive a visit from the novelist and Tieckian scholar, Eduard von Billow (the father of my young friend Billow), who was passing through Zürich. In my tiny little room I read him my chapter on poetry, and could not help noticing that he was greatly startled at my ideas on literary drama and on the advent of the new Shakespeare. I thought this all the more reason why Wigand the publisher should accept my new revolutionary book, and expected him to pay me a fee which would be in proportion to the greater size of the work. I asked for twenty louis d’or, and this sum he agreed to pay me. The prospect of receiving this amount induced me to carry out the plan, which need had forced upon me, of travelling to Paris and of trying my luck there as a composer of opera. This plan had very serious drawbacks; not only did I hate the idea, but I knew that I was doing an injustice to myself by believing in the success of my enterprise, for I felt that I could never seriously throw myself into it heart and soul.
Everything, however, combined to make me try the experiment, and it was Liszt in particular who, confident of this being my only way to fame, insisted upon my reopening the negotiations into which Belloni and I had entered during the previous summer. To show with what earnestness I tried to consider the chances of carrying out my plan, I drafted out the plot of the opera, which the French poet would only have to put into verse, because I never for a moment fancied that it would be possible for him to think out and write a libretto for which I would only need to compose the music. I chose for my subject the legend of Wieland der Schmied, upon which I commented with some stress at the end of my recently finished Kunstwerk der Zukunft, and the version of which by Simrock, taken from the Wilkyna legend, had greatly attracted me. I sketched out the complete scenario with precise indication of the dialogue for three acts, and with a heavy heart decided to hand it over to my Parisian author to be worked out. Liszt thought he saw a means of making my music known through his relations with Seghers, the musical director of a society then known as the ‘Concerts de St. Cecile.’ In January of the following year the Tannhäuser Overture was to be given under his baton, and it therefore seemed advisable that I should reach Paris some time before this event. This undertaking, which appeared to be so difficult owing to my complete lack of funds, was at last facilitated in a manner quite unexpected. I had written home for help, and had appealed to all the old friends I could think of, but in vain. By the family of my brother Albert in particular, whose daughter had recently entered upon a brilliant theatrical career, I was treated in much the same way as one treats an invalid by whom one dreads to become infected. In contrast to their harshness I was deeply touched by the devotion of the Ritter family, who had remained in Dresden; for, apart from my acquaintance with young Karl, I scarcely knew these people at all.
Through the kindness of my old friend Heine, who had been informed of my position, Frau Julie Ritter, the venerable mother of the family, had thought it her duty to place, through a business friend, the sum of fifteen hundred marks at my disposal. At about the same time I received a letter from Mme. Laussot, who had called upon me in Dresden the year before, and who now in the most affecting terms assured me of her continued sympathy. These were the first signs of that new phase in my life upon which I entered from this day forth, and in which I accustomed myself to look upon the outward circumstances of my existence as being merely subservient to my will. And by this means I was able to escape from the hampering narrowness of my home life. For the moment the proffered financial assistance was very distasteful to me, for it seemed to forbid my raising any further objections to the realisation of the detested Paris schemes. When, however, on the strength of this favourable change in my affairs, I suggested to my wife that we might, after all, content ourselves with remaining in Zürich, she flew into the most violent passion over my weakness and lack of spirit, and declared that if I did not make up my mind to achieve something in Paris, she would lose all faith in me. She said, moreover, that she absolutely refused to be a witness of my misery and grief as a wretched literary man and insignificant conductor of local concerts in Zürich. We had entered upon the year 1850; I had decided to go to Paris, if only for the sake of peace, but had to postpone my journey on account of ill-health. The reaction following upon the terrible excitement of recent times had not failed to have its effect on my overwrought nerves, and a state of complete exhaustion had followed. The continual colds, in spite of which I had been obliged to work in my very unhealthy room, had at last given rise to alarming symptoms.
A certain weakness of the chest became apparent, and this the doctor (a political refugee) undertook to cure by the application of pitch plasters. As the result of this treatment and the irritating effect it had upon my nerves, I lost my voice completely for a while; whereupon I was told that I must go away for a change. On going out to buy my ticket for the journey, I felt so weak and broke out into such terrible perspiration that I hastened to return to my wife in order to consult her as to the advisability, in the circumstances, of abandoning the idea of the expedition altogether. She, however, maintained (and perhaps rightly) not only that my condition was not dangerous, but that it was to a large extent due to imagination, and that, once in the right place, I would soon recover. An inexpressible feeling of bitterness stimulated my nerves as in anger and despair I quickly left the house to buy the confounded ticket for the journey, and in the beginning of February I actually started on the road to Paris. I was filled with the most extraordinary feelings, but the spark of hope which was then kindled in my breast certainly had nothing whatever to do with the belief that had been imposed upon me from without, that I was to make a success in Paris as a composer of operas. I was particularly anxious to find quiet rooms, for peace had now become my first necessity, no matter where I happened to be staying. The cabman who drove me from street to street through the most isolated quarters, and whom I at last accused of keeping always to the most animated parts of the city, finally protested in despair that one did not come to Paris to live in a convent. At last it occurred to me to look for what I wanted in one of the cites through which no vehicle seemed to drive, and I decided to engage rooms in the Cite de Provence. True to the plans which had been forced upon me, I at once called on Herr Seghers about the performance of the Tannhäuser Overture.
It turned out that in spite of my late arrival I had missed nothing, for they were still racking their brains as to how to procure the necessary orchestral parts. I therefore had to write to Liszt, asking him to order the copies, and had to wait for their arrival. Belloni was not in town, things were therefore at a standstill, and I had plenty of time to think over the object of my visit to Paris, while an unceasing accompaniment was poured out to my meditations by the barrel-organs which infest the cites of Paris. I had much difficulty in convincing an agent of the government, from whom I received a visit soon after my arrival, that my presence in Paris was due to artistic reasons, and not to my doubtful position as a political refugee. Fortunately he was impressed by the score, which I showed him, as well as by Liszt’s article on the Tannhäuser Overture, written the year before in the Journal des Debats, and he left me, politely inviting me to continue my avocations peacefully and industriously, as the police had no intention of disturbing me. I also looked up my older Parisian acquaintances. At the hospitable house of Desplechins I met Semper, who was trying to make his position as tolerable as possible by writing some inferior artistic work. He had left his family in Dresden, from which town we soon received the most alarming news. The prisons were gradually filling there with the unfortunate victims of the recent Saxon movement Of Röckel, Bakunin, and Heubner, all we could hear was that they had been charged with high treason, and that they were awaiting the death sentence. In view of the tidings which continually arrived concerning the cruelty and brutality with which the soldiers treated the prisoners, we could not help considering our own lot a very happy one. My intercourse with Semper, whom I saw frequently, was generally enlivened by a gaiety which was occasionally of rather a risky nature; he was determined to rejoin his family in London, where the prospect of various appointments was open to him.
My latest attempts at writing, and the thoughts expressed in my work, interested him greatly, and gave rise to animated conversations in which we were joined by Kietz, who was at first amusing, but evidently boring Semper considerably. I found the former in the identical position in which I had left him many years ago: he had made no headway with his painting, and would have been glad if the revolution had taken a more decided turn, so that, under cover of the general confusion, he might have escaped from his embarrassing position with his landlord. He made at this time quite a good pastel portrait of me in his very best and earliest style. While I was sitting I unfortunately spoke to him about my Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, and thereby laid the foundation for him of troubles that lasted many years, as he tried to instil my new ideas into the Parisian bourgeoisie at whose tables he had hitherto been a welcome guest. Notwithstanding, he remained as of old a good, obliging, true-hearted fellow, and even Semper could not help putting up with him cheerfully. I also looked up my friend Anders. It was a difficult matter to find him at any hour of the day, since out of sleeping hours he was closeted in the library, where he could receive no one, and afterwards retired to the reading-room to spend his hours of rest, and generally went to dine with certain bourgeois families where he gave music lessons. He had aged considerably, but I was glad to find him, comparatively speaking, in better health than the state in which I had last seen him had allowed me to hope, as when I left Paris before he had seemed to be in a decline. Curiously enough, a broken leg had been the means of improving his health, the treatment necessary for it having taken him to a hydro, where his condition had much improved.
His one idea was to see me achieve a great success in Paris, and he wished to secure a seat in advance for the first performance of my opera, which he took for granted was to appear, and kept repeating that it would be so very trying for him to occupy a place in any part of the theatre where there would be likely to be a crush. He could not see the use of my present literary work; in spite of this I was again engaged on it exclusively, as I soon ascertained there was no likelihood of my overture to Tannhäuser being produced. Liszt had shown the greatest zeal in obtaining and forwarding the orchestral parts; but Herr Seghers informed me that as far as his own orchestra was concerned, he found himself in a republican democracy where each instrument had an equal right to voice its opinion, and it had been unanimously decided that for the remainder of the winter season, which was now drawing to a close, my overture could be dispensed with. I gathered enough from this turn of affairs to realise how precarious my position was. It is true, the result of my writings was hardly less discouraging. A copy of the Wigand edition of my Kunstwerk der Zukunft was forwarded to me full of horrible misprints, and instead of the expected remuneration of twenty louis d’or, my publisher explained that for the present he could only pay me half this sum, as, owing to the fact that at first the sale of the Kunst und Revolution had been very rapid, he had been led to attach too high a commercial value to my writings, a mistake he had speedily discovered when he found there was no demand for Die Nibelungen. On the other hand, I received an offer of remunerative work from Adolph Kolatschek, who was also a fugitive, and was just going to bring out a German monthly journal as the organ of the progressive party. In response to this invitation I wrote a long essay on Kunst und Klima (‘Art and Climate’), in which I supplemented the ideas I had already touched upon in my Kunstwerk der Zukunft.
Besides this I had, since my arrival in Paris, worked out a more complete sketch of Wieland der Schmied. It is true that this work had no longer any value, and I wondered with apprehension what I could write home to my wife, now that the last precious remittance had been so aimlessly sacrificed. The thought of returning to Zürich was as distasteful to me as the prospect of remaining any longer in Paris. My feelings with regard to the latter alternative were intensified by the impression made upon me by Meyerbeer’s opera The Prophet, which had just been produced and which I had not heard before. Rearing itself on the ruins of the hopes for new and more noble endeavour which had animated the better works of the past year—the only result of the negotiations of the provisional French republic for the encouragement of art—I saw this work of Meyerbeer’s break upon the world like the dawn heralding this day of disgraceful desolation. I was so sickened by this performance, that though I was unfortunately placed in the centre of the stalls and would willingly have avoided the disturbance necessarily occasioned by one of the audience moving during the middle of an act, even this consideration did not deter me from getting up and leaving the house. When the famous mother of the prophet finally gives vent to her grief in the well-known series of ridiculous roulades, I was filled with rage and despair at the thought that I should be called upon to listen to such a thing, and never again did I pay the slightest heed to this opera. But what was I to do next? Just as the South American republics had attracted me during my first miserable sojourn in Paris, so now my longing was directed towards the East, where I could live my life in a manner worthy of a human being far away from this modern world. While I was in this frame of mind I was called upon to answer another inquiry as to my state of health from Mme. Laussot in Bordeaux.
It turned out that my answer prompted her to send me a kind and pressing invitation to go and stay at her house, at least for a short time, to rest and forget my troubles. In any circumstances an excursion to more southerly regions, which I had not yet seen, and a visit to people who, though utter strangers, showed such friendly interest in me, could not fail to prove attractive and flattering. I accepted, settled my affairs in Paris, and went by coach via Orleans, Tours, and Angouleme, down the Gironde to the unknown town, where I was received with great courtesy and cordiality by the young wine merchant Eugene Laussot, and presented to my sympathetic young friend, his wife. A closer acquaintance with the family, in which Mrs. Taylor, Mme. Laussot’s mother, was now also included, led to a clearer understanding of the character of the sympathy bestowed upon me in such a cordial and unexpected manner by people hitherto unknown to me. Jessie, as the young wife was called at home, had, during a somewhat lengthy stay in Dresden, become very intimate with the Ritter family, and I had no reason to doubt the assurance given me, that the Laussots’ interest in me and my work was principally owing to this intimacy. After my flight from Dresden, as soon as the news of my difficulties had reached the Ritters, a correspondence had been carried on between Dresden and Bordeaux with a view to ascertaining how best to assist me. Jessie attributed the whole idea to Frau Julie Ritter who, while not being well enough off herself to make me a sufficient allowance, was endeavouring to come to an understanding with Jessie’s mother, the well-to-do widow of an English lawyer, whose income entirely supported the young couple in Bordeaux. This plan had so far succeeded, that shortly after my arrival in Bordeaux Mrs. Taylor informed me that the two families had combined, and that it had been decided to ask me to accept the help of three thousand francs a year until the return of better days.
My one object now was to enlighten my benefactors as to the exact conditions under which I should be accepting such assistance. I could no longer reckon upon achieving any success as a composer of opera either in Paris or elsewhere; what line I should take up instead I did not know; but, at all events, I was determined to keep myself free from the disgrace which would reflect upon my whole life if I used such means as this offer presented to secure success. I feel sure I am not wrong in believing that Jessie was the only one who understood me, and though I only experienced kindness from the rest of the family, I soon discovered the gulf by which she, as well as myself, was separated from her mother and husband. While the husband, who was a handsome young man, was away the greater part of the day attending to his business, and the mother’s deafness excluded her to a great extent from our conversations, we soon discovered by a rapid exchange of ideas that we shared the same opinions on many important matters, and this led to a great feeling of friendship between us. Jessie, who was at that time about twenty-two, bore little resemblance to her mother, and no doubt took after her father, of whom I heard most flattering accounts. A large and varied collection of books loft by this man to his daughter showed his tastes, for besides carrying on his lucrative profession as a lawyer, he had devoted himself to the study of literature and science. From him Jessie had also learned German as a child, and she spoke that language with great fluency. She had been brought up on Grimm’s fairy-tales, and was, moreover, thoroughly acquainted with German poetry, as well as with that of England and France, and her knowledge of them was as thorough as the most advanced education could demand. French literature did not appeal to her much. Her quick powers of comprehension were astonishing. Everything which I touched upon she immediately grasped and assimilated.
It was the same with music: she read at sight with the greatest facility, and was an accomplished player. During her stay in Dresden she had been told that I was still in search of the pianist who could play Beethoven’s great Sonata in B flat major, and she now astonished me by her finished rendering of this most difficult piece. The emotion aroused in me by finding such an exceptionally developed talent suddenly changed to anxiety when I heard her sing. Her sharp, shrill voice, in which there was strength but no real depth of feeling, so shocked me that I could not refrain from begging her to desist from singing in future. With regard to the execution of the sonata, she listened eagerly to my instructions as to how it should be interpreted, though I could not feel that she would succeed in rendering it according to my ideas. I read her my latest essays, and she seemed to understand even the most extraordinary descriptions perfectly. My poem on Siegfried’s Tod moved her deeply, but she preferred my sketch of Wieland der Schmied. She admitted afterwards that she would prefer to imagine herself filling the role of Wieland’s worthy bride than to find herself in the position and forced to endure the fate of Gutrune in Siegfried. It followed inevitably that the presence of the other members of the family proved embarrassing when we wanted to talk over and discuss these various subjects. If we felt somewhat troubled at having to confess to ourselves that Mrs. Taylor would certainly never be able to understand why I was being offered assistance, I was still more disconcerted at realising after a time the complete want of harmony between the young couple, particularly from an intellectual point of view. The fact that Laussot had for some time been well aware of his wife’s dislike for him was plainly shown when he one day so far forgot himself as to complain loudly and bitterly that she would not even love a child of his if she had one, and that he therefore thought it fortunate that she was not a mother.
Astonished and saddened, I suddenly gazed into an abyss which was hidden here, as is often the case, under the appearance of a tolerably happy married life. About this time, and just as my visit, which had already lasted three weeks, was drawing to a close, I received a letter from my wife that could not have had a more unfortunate effect on my state of mind. She was, on the whole, pleased at my having found new friends, but at the same time explained that if I did not immediately return to Paris, and there endeavour to secure the production of my overture with the results anticipated, she would not know what to think of me, and would certainly fail to understand me if I returned to Zürich without having effected my purpose. At the same time my depression was intensified in a terrible way by a notice in the papers announcing that Röckel, Bakunin, and Heubner had been sentenced to death, and that the date of their execution was fixed. I wrote a short but stirring letter of farewell to the two first, and as I saw no possibility of having it conveyed to the prisoners, who were confined in the fortress of Konigstein, I decided to send it to Frau von Lüttichau, to be forwarded to them by her, because I thought she was the only person in whose power it might lie to do this for me, while at the same time she had sufficient generosity and independence of mind to enable her to respect and carry out my wishes, in spite of any possible difference of opinion she might entertain. I was told some time afterwards that Lüttichau had got hold of the letter and thrown it into the fire. For the time being this painful impression helped me to the determination to break with every one and everything, to lose all desire to learn more of life or of art, and, even at the risk of having to endure the greatest privations, to trust to chance and put myself beyond the reach of everybody.
The small income settled upon me by my friends I wished to divide between myself and my wife, and with my half go to Greece or Asia Minor, and there, Heaven alone knew how, seek to forget and be forgotten. I communicated this plan to the only confidante I had left to me, chiefly in order that she might be able to enlighten my benefactors as to how I intended disposing of the income they had offered me. She seemed pleased with the idea, and the resolve to abandon herself to the same fate seemed to her also, in her resentment against her position, to be quite an easy matter. She expressed us much by hints and a word dropped here and there. Without clearly realising what it would lead to, and without coming to any understanding with her, I left Bordeaux towards the end of April, more excited than soothed in spirit, and filled with regret and anxiety. I returned to Paris, for the time being, stunned and full of uncertainty as to what to do next. Feeling very unwell, exhausted, and at the same time excited from want of sleep, I reached my destination and put up at the Hotel Valois, where I remained a week, struggling to gain my self-control and to face my strange position. Even if I had wished to resume the plans which had been instrumental in bringing me to Paris, I soon convinced myself that little or nothing could be done. I was filled with distress and anger at being called upon to waste my energies in a direction contrary to my tastes, merely to satisfy the unreasonable demands made upon me. I was at length obliged to answer my wife’s last pressing communication, and wrote her a long and detailed letter in which I kindly, but at the same time frankly, retraced the whole of our life together, and explained that I was fully determined to set her free from any immediate participation in my fate, as I felt quite incapable of so arranging it so as to meet with her approval.
I promised her the half of whatever means I should have at my disposal now or in the future, and told her she must accept this arrangement with a good grace, because the occasion had now arisen to take that step of parting from me which, on our first meeting again in Switzerland, she had declared herself ready to do. I ended my letter without bidding her a final farewell. I thereupon wrote to Bordeaux immediately to inform Jessie of the step I had taken, though my means did not as yet allow of my forming any definite plan which I could communicate to her for my complete flight from the world. In return she announced that she was determined to do likewise, and asked for my protection, under which she intended to place herself when once she had set herself free. Much alarmed, I did all in my power to make her realise that it was one thing for a man, placed in such a desperate situation as myself, to cut himself adrift in the face of insurmountable difficulties, but quite another matter for a young woman, at least to all outward appearances, happily settled, to decide to break up her home, for reasons which probably no one except myself would be in a position to understand. Regarding the unconventionality of her resolve in the eyes of the world, she assured me that it would be carried out as quietly as possible, and that for the present she merely thought of arranging to visit her friends the Ritters in Dresden. I felt so upset by all this that I yielded to my craving for retirement, and sought it at no great distance from Paris. Towards the middle of April I went to Montmorency, of which I had heard many agreeable accounts, and there sought a modest hiding-place. With great difficulty I dragged myself to the outskirts of the little town, where the country still bore a wintry aspect, and turned into the little strip of garden belonging to a wine merchant, which was filled with visitors only on Sundays, and there refreshed myself with some bread and cheese and a bottle of wine.
A crowd of hens surrounded me, and I kept throwing them pieces of bread, and was touched by the self-sacrificing abstemiousness with which the cock gave all to his wives though I aimed particularly at him. They became bolder and bolder, and finally flew on to the table and attacked my provisions; the cock flew after them, and noticing that everything was topsy-turvy, pounced upon the cheese with the eagerness of a craving long unsatisfied. When I found myself being driven from the table by this chaos of fluttering wings, I was filled with a gaiety to which I had long been a stranger. I laughed heartily, and looked round for the signboard of the inn. I thereby discovered that my host rejoiced in the name of Homo. This seemed a hint from Fate, and I felt I must seek shelter here at all costs. An extraordinarily small and narrow bedroom was shown me, which I immediately engaged. Besides the bed it held a rough table and two cane-bottomed chairs. I arranged one of these as a washhand-stand, and on the table I placed some books, writing materials, and the score of Lohengrin, and almost heaved a sigh of content in spite of my extremely cramped accommodation. Though the weather remained uncertain and the woods with their leafless trees did not seem to offer the prospect of very enticing walks, I still felt that here there was a possibility of my being forgotten, and being also in my turn allowed to forget the events that had lately filled me with Midi desperate anxiety. My old artistic instinct awoke again. I looked over my Lohengrin score, and quickly decided to send it to Liszt and leave it to him to bring it out as best he could. Now that I had got rid of this score also, I felt as free as a bird and as careless as Diogenes about what might befall me. I even invited Kietz to come and stay with me and share the pleasures of my retreat. He did actually come, as he had done during my stay in. Mendon; but he found me even more modestly installed than I had been there.
He was quite prepared to take pot-luck, however, and cheerfully slept on an improvised bed, promising to keep the world in touch with me upon his return to Paris. I was suddenly startled from my state of complacency by the news that my wife had come to Paris to look me up. I had an hour’s painful struggle with myself to settle the course I should pursue, and decided not to allow the step I had taken in regard to her to be looked upon as an ill-considered and excusable vagary. I left Montmorency and betook myself to Paris, summoned Kietz to my hotel, and instructed him to tell my wife, who had already been trying to gain admittance to him, that he knew nothing more of me except that I had left Paris. The poor fellow, who felt as much pity for Minna as for me, was so utterly bewildered on this occasion, that he declared that he felt as though he were the axis upon which all the misery in the world turned. But he apparently realised the significance and importance of my decision, as it was necessary he should, and acquitted himself in this delicate matter with intelligence and good feeling. That night t left Paris by train for Clermont-Tonnerre, from whence I travelled on to Geneva, there to await news from Frau Ritter in Dresden. My exhaustion was such that, even had I possessed the necessary means, I could not as yet have contemplated undergoing the fatigue of a long journey. By way of gaining time for further developments I retired to Villeneuve, at the other end of the Lake of Geneva, where I put up at the Hotel Byron, which was quite empty at the time. Here I learned that Karl Ritter had arrived in Zürich, as he said he would, with the intention of paying me a visit. Impressing upon him the necessity for the strictest secrecy, I invited him to join me at the Lake of Geneva, and in the second week in May we met at the Hotel Byron.
The characteristic which pleased me in him was his absolute devotion, his quick comprehension of my position and the necessity of my resolutions, as well as his readiness to submit without question to all my arrangements, even where he himself was concerned. He was full of my latest literary efforts, told me what an impression they had made on his acquaintances, and thereby induced me to spend the few days of rest I was enjoying in preparing my poem of Siegfried’s Tod for publication. I wrote a short preface dedicating this poem to my friends as a relic of the time when I had hoped to devote myself entirely to art, and especially to the composition of music. I sent this manuscript to Herr Wigand in Leipzig, who returned it to me after some time with the remark, that if I insisted on its being printed in Latin characters he would not be able to sell a single copy of it. Later on I discovered that he deliberately refused to pay me the ten louis d’or due to me for Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, which I had directed him to send to my wife. Disappointing as all this was, I was nevertheless unable to engage in any further work, as only a few days after Karl’s arrival the realities of life made themselves felt in an unexpected manner, most upsetting to my tranquillity of mind. I received a wildly excited letter from Mme. Laussot to tell me that she had not been able to resist telling her mother of her intentions, that in so doing she had immediately aroused the suspicion that I was to blame, and in consequence of this her disclosure had been communicated to M. Laussot, who vowed he would search everywhere for me in order to put a bullet through my body. The situation was clear enough, and I decided to go to Bordeaux immediately in order to come to an understanding with my opponent I at once wrote fully to M.
Eugene, endeavouring to make him see matters in their true light, but at the same time declared myself incapable of understanding how a man could bring himself to keep a woman with him by force, when she no longer wished to remain. I ended by informing him that I should reach Bordeaux at, the same time as my letter, and immediately upon my arrival there would let him know at what hotel to find me; also that I would not tell his wife of the step I was taking, and that he could consequently act without restraint. I did not conceal from him, what indeed was the fact, that I was undertaking this journey under great difficulties, as under the circumstances I considered it impossible to wait to have my passport endorsed by the French envoy. At the same time I wrote a few lines to Mme. Laussot, exhorting her to be calm and self-possessed, but, true to my purpose, refrained from even hinting at any movement on my part. (When, years afterwards, I told Liszt this story, he declared I had acted very stupidly in not, telling Mme. Laussot of my intentions.) I took leave of Karl the same day, in order to set out next morning from Geneva on my tedious journey across France. But I was so exhausted by all this that I could not help thinking I was going to die. That same night I wrote to Frau Ritter in Dresden, to this effect, giving her a short account of the incredible difficulties I had been drawn into. As a matter of fact, I suffered great inconvenience at the French frontier on account of my passport; I was made to give my exact place of destination, and it was only upon my assuring them that pressing family affairs required my immediate presence, that the authorities showed exceptional leniency and allowed me to proceed. I travelled by Lyons through Auvergne by stage-coach for three days and two nights, till at length I reached Bordeaux. It was the middle of May, and as I surveyed the town from a height at early dawn I saw it lit up by a fire that had broken out.
I alighted at the Hotel Quatre Soeurs, and at once sent a note to M. Laussot, informing him that I held myself at his disposal and would remain in all day to receive him. It was nine o’clock in the morning when I sent him this message. I waited in vain for an answer, till at last, late in the afternoon, I received a summons from the police-station to present myself immediately. There I was first of all asked whether my passport was in order. I acknowledged the difficulty I found myself in with regard to it, and explained that family matters had necessitated my placing myself in this position. I was thereupon informed that precisely this family matter, which had no doubt brought me there, was the cause of their having to deny me the permission to remain in Bordeaux any longer. In answer to my question, they did not conceal the fact that these proceedings against me were being carried out at the express wish of the family concerned. This extraordinary revelation immediately restored my good-humour. I asked the police inspector whether, after such a trying journey, I might not be allowed a couple of days’ rest before returning; this request he readily granted, and told me that in any case there could be no chance of my meeting the family in question, as they had left Bordeaux at mid-day. I used these two days to recover from my fatigue, and also wrote a letter to Jessie, in which I told her exactly what had taken place, without concealing my contempt at the behaviour of her husband, who could expose his wife’s honour by a denunciation to the police. I also added that our friendship could certainly not continue until she had released herself from so humiliating a position. The next thing was to get this letter safely delivered. The information furnished me by the police officials was not sufficient to enlighten me as to what had exactly taken place in the Laussot family, whether they had left home for some length of time or merely for a day, so I simply made up my mind to go to their house.
I rang the bell and the door sprang open; without meeting any one I walked up to the first-floor flat, the door of which stood open, and went from room to room till I reached Jessie’s boudoir, where I placed my letter in her work-basket and returned the way I had come. I received no reply, and set out upon my return journey as soon as the term of rest granted me had expired. The fine May weather had a cheering effect upon me, and the clear water, as well as the agreeable name of the Dordogne, along whose banks the post-chaise travelled for some distance, gave me great pleasure. I was also entertained by the conversation of two fellow-travellers, a priest and an officer, about the necessity of putting an end to the French Republic. The priest showed himself much more humane and broad-minded than his military interlocutor, who could only repeat the one refrain, ‘Il faut en finir.’ I now had a look at Lyons, and in a walk round the town tried to recall the scenes in Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins, where he so vividly describes the siege and surrender of the town during the period of the Convention Nationale. At last I arrived at Geneva, and returned to the Byron hotel, where Karl Hitter was awaiting me. During my absence he had heard from his family, who wrote very kindly concerning me. His mother had at once reassured him as to my condition, and pointed out that with people suffering from nervous disorders the idea of approaching death was a frequent symptom, and that there was consequently no occasion to feel anxious about me. She also announced her intention of coming to visit us in Villeneuve with her daughter Emilie in a few days’ time. This news made me take heart again; this devoted family, so solicitous for my welfare, seemed sent by Providence to lead me, as I so longed to be led, to a new life. Both ladies arrived in time to celebrate my thirty-seventh birthday on the twenty-second of May. The mother, Frau Julie, particularly made a deep impression upon me.
I had only met her once before in Dresden, when Karl had invited me to be present at the performance of a quartette of his own composition, given at his mother’s house. On this occasion the respect and devotion shown me by each member of the family had delighted me. The mother had hardly spoken to me, but when I was leaving she was moved to tears as she thanked me for my visit. I was unable to understand her emotion at the time, but now when I reminded her of it she was surprised, and explained that she had felt so touched at my unexpected kindness to her son. She and her daughter remained with us about a week. We sought diversion in excursions to the beautiful Valais, but did not succeed in dispelling Frau Hitter’s sadness of heart, caused by the knowledge of recent events of which she had now been informed, as well as by her anxiety at the course my life was taking. As I afterwards learned, it had cost the nervous, delicate woman a great effort to undertake this journey, and when I urged her to leave her house to come and settle in Switzerland with her family, so that we might all be united, she at last pointed out to me that in proposing what seemed to her such an eccentric undertaking, I was counting upon a strength and energy she no longer possessed. For the present she commended her son, whom she wished to leave with me, to my care, and gave me the necessary means to keep us both for the time being. Regarding the state of her fortune, she told me that her income was limited, and now that it was impossible to accept any help from the Laussots, she did not know how she would be able to come to my assistance sufficiently to assure my independence. Deeply moved, we took leave of this venerable woman at the end of a week, and she returned to Dresden with her daughter, and I never saw her again. Still bent upon discovering a means of disappearing from the world, I thought of choosing a wild mountain spot where I could retire with Karl.
For this purpose we sought the lonely Visper Thal in the canton Valais, and not without difficulty made our way along the impracticable roads to Zermatt. There, at the foot of the colossal and beautiful Matterhorn, we could indeed consider ourselves cut off from the outer world. I tried to make things as comfortable as I could in this primitive wilderness, but discovered only too soon that Karl could not reconcile himself to his surroundings. Even on the second day he owned that he thought it horrid, and suggested that it would be more pleasant in the neighbourhood of one of the lakes. We studied the map of Switzerland, and chose Thun for our next destination. Unfortunately I again found myself reduced to a state of extreme nervous fatigue, in which the slightest effort produced a profuse and weakening perspiration. Only by the greatest strength of will was I able to make my way out of the valley; but at last we reached Thun, and with renewed courage engaged a couple of modest but cheerful rooms looking out on to the road, and proposed to wait and see how we should like it. In spite of the reserve which still betrayed his shyness of character, I found conversation with my young friend always pleasant and enlivening. I now realised the pitch of fluent and overflowing vivacity to which the young man could attain, particularly at night before retiring to rest, when he would squat down beside my bed, and in the agreeable, pure dialect of the German Baltic provinces, give free expression to whatever had excited his interest. I was exceedingly cheered during these days by the perusal of the Odyssey, which I had not read for so long and which had fallen into my hands by chance. Homer’s long-suffering hero, always homesick yet condemned to perpetual wandering, and always valiantly overcoming all difficulties, was strangely sympathetic to me. Suddenly the peaceful state I had scarcely yet entered upon was disturbed by a letter which Karl received from Mme. Laussot.
He did not know whether he ought to show it to me, as he thought Jessie had gone mad. I tore it out of his hand, and found she had written to say that she felt obliged to let my friend know that she had been sufficiently enlightened about me to make her drop my acquaintance entirely. I afterwards discovered, chiefly through the help of Frau Ritter, that in consequence of my letter and my arrival in Bordeaux, M. Laussot, together with Mrs. Taylor, had immediately taken Jessie to the country, intending to remain there until the news was received of my departure, to accelerate which he had applied to the police authorities. While they were away, and without telling her of my letter and my journey, they had obtained a promise from the young woman to remain quiet for a year, give up her visit to Dresden, and, above all, to drop all correspondence with me; since, under these conditions, she was promised her entire freedom at the end of that time, she had thought it better to give her word. Not content with this, however, the two conspirators had immediately set about calumniating me on all sides, and finally to Mme. Laussot herself, saying that I was the initiator of this plan of elopement. Mrs. Taylor had written to my wife complaining of my intention to commit adultery, at the same time expressing her pity for her and offering her support; the unfortunate Minna, who now thought she had found a hitherto unsuspected reason for my resolve to remain separated from her, wrote back complaining of me to Mrs. Taylor. The meaning of an innocent remark I had once made had been strangely misinterpreted, and matters wore now aggravated by making it appear as though I had intentionally lied.
In the course of playful conversation Jessie had once told me that she belonged to no recognised form of religion, her father Having teen a member of a certain sect which did not baptise either according to the Protestant or the Roman Catholic ritual; whereupon I had comforted her by assuring her that I had come in contact with much more questionable sects, as shortly after my marriage in Königsberg I had learned that it had been solemnised by a hypocrite. God alone knows in what form this had been repeated to the worthy British matron, but, at all events, she told my wife that I had said I was ‘not legally married to her.’ In any case, my wife’s answer to this had no doubt furnished further material with which to poison Jessie’s mind against me, and this letter to my young friend was the result. I must admit that, seen by this light, the circumstance at which I felt most indignant was the way my wife had been treated, and while I was perfectly indifferent as to what the rest of the party thought of me, I immediately accepted Karl’s offer to go to Zürich and see her, so as to give her the explanation necessary to her peace of mind. While awaiting his return, I received a letter from Liszt, telling me of the deep impression made upon him by my Lohengrin score, which had caused him to make up his mind as to the future in store for me. He at the same time announced that, as I had given him the permission to do so, he intended doing all in his power to bring about the production of my opera at the forthcoming Herder festival in Weimar. About this time I also heard from Frau Ritter, who, in consequence of events of which she was well aware, thought herself called upon to beg me not to take the matter too much to heart. At this moment Karl also returned from Zürich, and spoke with great warmth of my wife’s attitude.
Not having found me in Paris, she had pulled herself together with remarkable energy, and in pursuance of an earlier wish of mine, had rented a house on the lake of Zürich, installed herself comfortably, and remained there in the hope of at last hearing from me again. Besides this, he had much to tell me of Sulzer’s good sense and friendliness, the latter having stood by, my wife and shown her great sympathy. In the midst of his narrative Karl suddenly exclaimed, ‘Ah! these could be called sensible people; but with such a mad Englishwoman nothing could be done.’ To all this I said not a word, but finally with a smile asked him whether he would like to go over to Zürich? He sprang up exclaiming, ‘Yes, and as soon as possible.’ ‘You shall have your way,’ said I; ‘let us pack. I can see no sense in anything either here or there.’ Without breathing another syllable about all that had happened, we left the next day for Zürich.
Chapter One WHEN I GOT BACK to HaveRatton Station, a bunch of humans tried to kill me. Considering how much I’d been thinking about killing a bunch of humans, it was only fair. Ship was on approach and I was waiting impatiently to pick up HaveRatton’s feed. Since Ship was a minimum capacity bot pilot and had all the brains and personality of a heat shield generator, I was also monitoring all its inputs and caught the navigation alert when it came in. (I knew Ship wouldn’t betray me intentionally, but the chance of it doing so unintentionally was resting at a solid 84 percent.) The alert was from HaveRatton’s Port Authority, and ordered Ship to divert away from its usual slot in the private commercial docks to another section at the end of the public passenger embarkation zone. I still had the schematic of HaveRatton from when I had boarded Ship here on the way to Milu. I could see that section of the embarkation zone was right next to the PA’s docks, where the deployment point for the station’s security response team was. Oh, that’s not suspicious at all. Was it about me? Maybe, probably? Ship had carried Wilken and Gerth, who had been sent to sabotage GoodNightLander Independent’s attempt to reclaim GrayCris’ abandoned terraforming facility, so it might be about them. Wilken and/or Gerth were hopefully being held by GI somewhere now, and GI might have requested HaveRatton do a routine search for evidence. It didn’t matter. If there was anybody waiting for Ship, I couldn’t be aboard when it docked. I could direct Ship to a different dock but that wasn’t a great idea. The PA would not only know someone aboard had done it, but that that someone was riding a bot-piloted cargo transport whose feed manifest said it was currently traveling without crew or passengers and was on minimal life-support. Even stations as big and heavily armed as HaveRatton had to be careful of anomalous approaches that might turn out to be raiders attempting to board.
(It would be a stupid attempt, since Ship couldn’t carry enough raiders to do anything but die messily in the embarkation zone, but I’d spent my entire life on security contracts trying to stop humans from similar catastrophic stupidity.) It might worry the station command enough that they would fire on Ship. Ship might be unresponsive but it was doing its best and I didn’t want it hurt. So it was a good thing I still had the evac suit. I’d used it to escape Abene’s shuttle after the combat bot attack—another thing that had happened that I wished I could delete from my memory. (Deleting memories like that doesn’t work. I can delete things from my data storage, but not from the organic parts of my head. The company had purged my memory a few times, including my whole mass murder incident, and the images hung around like ghosts in an endless historical family drama serial.) (I like endless historical family drama serials, but in real life, ghosts are way more annoying.) Earlier when I was getting ready for station arrival, I had packed the evac suit into a supply locker. I figured since Ship seldom ran passengers along with cargo, it would be a long time before somebody finally noticed it wasn’t on inventory and actually checked its docs and registrations. Now I started unpacking it, fast. I really didn’t want to get caught. I stuffed my bag under my jacket and got the suit on and activated. As Ship made its docking maneuver and eased up on the designated slot, I cycled through the cargo module airlock on the opposite side. Ship’s drones gathered to watch me, confused as to why I was going out the wrong door and beeping sadly about it. As Ship locked on to the station, I slipped out the airlock and sent a close and seal request. As I pulled myself along Ship’s outer skin, I deleted the last few bits of me from its memory. Bye, Ship. You were there when it counted.
If a report of what had happened on Milu had gone out on a faster transport (Ship’s progress was leisurely at best) then it could have easily beat me here. They might know that a SecUnit had come to Milu, saved some humans, failed to save a human form bot, killed the shit out of three combat bots, and that Ship was the only transport who had left Milu right after all that happened. Me not being aboard when they searched, with no sign of having been there, would obscure the issue somewhat. It’s not like I needed any food or used waste disposal. I’d used a little extra air and the shower but I’d purged the recycling logs. A forensic sweep might show that I’d been there. If forensic sweeps worked like they did in the entertainment media, which, come to think about it, I had no idea if they did or not. (Note to self: look up real forensic sweeps.) I reached the side of the station, doing a physical scan for security cams or drones or whatever while searching for feed and comm signals. Other ships were locked on nearby, but all I could see were hulls and bulky cargo mod ules, no large viewports with humans looking out wondering who that random escaping SecUnit in the suit was. I caught a few signals, but all were either debris detectors or cargo bot guides. I followed the line of magnetic clamps used by the cargo bots to secure modules to the station, and found a bot in the process of removing a module from a large cargo transport. I accessed the bot’s feed channel and checked its work orders. The transport it was currently working on was bot-piloted, crew on leave, passengers disembarked. I asked the cargo bot if I could go inside the transport before it inserted the new empty module. It said sure. (Humans never think to tell their bots things like, say, don’t respond to random individuals wandering the outside of the station.
Bots are instructed to report and repel theft attempts, but no one ever tells them not to answer polite requests from other bots.) I climbed inside the empty module structure and up to the airlock. I pinged the transport, it pinged back. I didn’t have time to bribe it, so I sent it the official station hauler’s security key I had just pulled from the cargo bot’s memory, and asked it if I could come inside and walk through and out to the dock. It said sure. I cycled through the lock, took off the evac suit, and found a storage locker to pack it into. At the main airlock, I borrowed the security camera to take a look at myself. I’d removed the blood and fluid from my clothes back on Ship, in the cleaning unit in its passenger restroom, but there hadn’t been anything on board to fix the projectile and shrapnel holes. Fortunately the jacket I was wearing was dark and the holes weren’t that visible, and the shirt collar was just high enough to cover the disabled data port in the back of my neck. Normally that wasn’t a problem, as most humans had never seen a SecUnit without armor and would assume the port was just an augment. If the humans who had diverted Ship were after me, they probably knew that a SecUnit without armor would look like an augmented human. (Possibly I was overthinking this. I do that; it’s the anxiety that comes with being a part-organic murderbot. The upside was paranoid attention to detail. The downside was also paranoid attention to detail.) I made sure I was running the code I’d written to make my walking gait and body language more human, deleted myself out of the transport’s log, and walked out through the main airlock into the station docks. I was already in the feed, using it to hack into the station’s weapons-scanning drones, telling them to ignore me. It was always important to hack the weapon scanners, since I have two inbuilt energy weapons in my forearms. This time it was more important, because among other things I had an armor-piercing projectile weapon and ammo in my bag.
It was one of Wilken and Gerth’s weapons that I’d taken when I left Milu. I’d spent some time on the return trip using Ship’s tool suite to take it apart and rebuild it into a more compact form, so it was easier to conceal. So now I was not only a rogue unit, I was a rogue unit carrying a weapon designed to shoot armored security. Which is just playing to the humans’ expectations, I guess. But fooling the weapons scanners was so much easier now than it had been the first time I’d done it while leaving Port FreeCommerce. Part of it was learning the quirks of the different security systems I was encountering. But what really helped was that all this coding and working with different systems on the fly had opened up some new neural pathways and processing space. I’d noticed it on Milu, when I’d been handling multiple inputs without any Hub or SecSystem assistance, to the point where I thought my brain was going to implode. Hard work really did make you improve; who knew? Following my map, I left the secure (supposedly secure) dock area and took the walkway toward the station mall. It passed over the end of the public embarkation zone and the PA dock where Ship had been directed. I had been in crowds of humans enough times by now I shouldn’t panic anymore—I had ridden on a transport with a whole crowd of humans who thought I was an augmented human security consultant and talked at me nonstop nearly the whole time. Except there was a little panic. I should be over this by now. Every nerve in the organic parts of me twitched as I blended with a large group of transport passengers. It helps that in stations like this, humans and augmented humans are distracted. Everybody’s a stranger, everybody’s checking the feed for info or communication or entertainment while they’re walking. As the walkway passed in front of Ship’s slot, I spotted a big group down on the embarkation floor. With the rest of the crowd of humans, I turned my head to glance down.
Twenty-three of them in power suits, all heavily armed, forming up for a boarding operation. None were in SecUnit armor, and I wasn’t picking up any pings, so they were probably all human or augmented human. Forty-seven security drones of various sizes and armament circled over their heads in a deployment-ready swarm. I caught a station security drone and had it zoom in on the shoulder logo of a suit. I didn’t recognize it immediately, except for the fact that it wasn’t a HaveRatton station logo. I tagged it for a future image search. HaveRatton Station Security was there, but they were back at the entrance to the Port Authority zone, watching the boarding operation. So whoever it was had contracted with HaveRatton to bring an armed team in. That’s expensive. And worrying. You don’t need twenty-three humans in power suits and a flotilla of security drones for an evidence search. Station security had to be using their drones to keep an eye on the security company stamping around on their dock area. I checked my captive StationSec drone’s recording buffer and found nearly an hour of intercepted comm traffic. I downloaded it and ran a query for the word SecUnit. It hit almost immediately. SecUnit. You think this thing is really onboard? Intel says possibly. I— With its controller? No controller, dim-iot, that’s why they call them rogues. Oh yeah. It was about me. * * * On Milu’s terraforming facility/illegal alien remnant mining platform, Wilken and Gerth had recognized me as a SecUnit. It had come in handy at the time, but it wasn’t something I wanted to happen again. Ever again. My friend ART had changed my configuration, removing up to a centimeter from my arms and legs so I wouldn’t match a scan for SecUnit standard body shape. ART’s alterations to my code had made parts of me grow sparse, soft, humanlike body hair, and changed the way my skin met the edges of my inorganic parts, so they looked more like augments. It was subtle, something ART thought would lessen human suspicion on a subliminal level.
(ART’s pretentious like that.) The change in code had also made my eyebrows and the hair on my head get thicker, and that made my face look far more different than such a slight change should. I didn’t like it, but it was necessary. But it wasn’t enough of a change to fool humans familiar with SecUnits. (Granted, running up a wall in front of Wilken and Gerth had been a dead giveaway before they even got a real look at me.) I could control my behavior (well, sort of, mostly) but I needed to control my appearance. So while I was still on Ship, I had used ART’s templates to alter my code temporarily to let the hair on my head grow at an accelerated rate. (Accelerated because if I screwed up and started getting near the bipedal furry media monster end of the spectrum, I’d still have a chance to fix it.) I gave the hair on my head another two centimeters of growth, then stopped it when I hit my target. To check my results, I’d pulled up an image from my archived video, and found a good view of my face from Dr. Mensah’s camera. I don’t usually use cameras to look at myself because why the hell would I want to do that, but I had been on contract then and still collecting all my clients’ feeds. From the timestamp, the image was from when we’d been standing outside the hoppers, when GrayCris was hunting us, and she had asked me to let the others see my face so they would trust me. I’d compared that old image with my current image via drone cam. After all the changes, I did look different now, and more human. I didn’t like it even more. But now that I was back on HaveRatton with an as yet unidentified security force looking for me, it was coming in handy. The next step was to get rid of my clothing and its obvious projectile holes. At the edge of the station mall, I forced myself to walk into one of the big travelers’ supply places. I had used station vending machines to buy memory clips, but I had never been in an actual shop before.
Even though the vending was all automated, and I sort of knew what to do based on what I had seen on the entertainment feed, it was still weird. (And by weird I mean an agonizing level of anxiety.) Fortunately there are apparently humans as clueless as I was because as soon as I crossed the threshold the shop’s feed immediately sent me an interactive instruction module. It guided me to one of the empty vending booths, which was completely enclosed. Telling it to shut the privacy door was such a relief my performance reliability percentage went up half a point. The booth scanned my hard currency card and then offered a set of menus. I picked the one that was labeled as basic, practical, and comfortable for travel. I hesitated over long skirts, wide pants, full-length caftans, and tunics and jackets that went to the knees. The idea of combining them all, and having a lot of clothing as a buffer between me and the outside world, was attractive, but I wasn’t used to it and I was afraid that would show. (It had taken me long enough to figure out what to do with my arms and hands while walking and standing still; extra clothing meant that much more potential for attention-drawing mistakes.) The scarves and hats and other head and face coverings, some of which had human cultural functions, were also tempting, but it was exactly the kind of thing a SecUnit trying to hide might use, and would just flag me for additional security scans. I’d worn two different sets of human clothes by now, so I had a better idea of what was most efficient for me. I picked workboots not much different from the ones I’d stolen back on Port FreeCommerce, self-sizing and with some shielding to protect against heavy things dropping on them, not as important for me as a human. Then pants with lots of sealable pockets, a long-sleeved shirt with a collar to cover my data port, and another soft hooded jacket. Okay, so it was extremely similar to what I had been wearing, just in a different arrangement of black and dark blue.
I authorized the payment, and the packets dropped out of the slot. When I put the new clothes on, I had a strange feeling I usually associated with finding a new show on the entertainment feed that looked good. I “liked” these clothes. Maybe I actually liked them enough to remove the quotation marks around “liked.” I don’t like things in general that can’t be downloaded via the entertainment feed. Maybe because I’d picked them myself. Maybe. I got a replacement knapsack, too, a better one with more sealable pockets. I dressed, got a discount because I was willing to dump my old clothes into the shop’s recycler, and left the booth. Back out in the station mall, blending with the crowd, I started downloading new entertainment media and transport schedules, and started a feed search for news reports. My image search had turned up a name for the security company logo: Palisade. I started a search on it, too. I needed to get off HaveRatton as soon as possible, and figure out a good way to get my memory clips to Dr. Mensah. The clips I had stashed in my arm had a lot of data drawn directly from the Milu diggers about the strange synthetics that GrayCris had illegally extracted under the guise of a terraforming operation. And the memory clip I had found in Wilken and Gerth’s gear was even more revealing. It was records of their work history for GrayCris, carefully organized and arranged, ready to submit to journalists or a corporate rival. I think it was a blackmail threat, or an attempt to ensure that GrayCris didn’t try to kill them. Whatever it was, I had it now. Taking it and the other clips to Mensah in person would be the most secure method, and that’s what I meant to do. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to see her again. (Or more accurately, for her to see me again.) Thinking about her brought up a whole knot of confused emotion I didn’t want to deal with right now. Or ever, actually. But it wasn’t a decision I had to make immediately.
(Yeah, “Or ever, actually” applied there, too.) I could always break in to wherever she was staying and leave the clips in her belongings with a note. (I’d thought a lot about the note. I had other options but would probably go with “Hope this evidence against GrayCris helps, signed Murderbot.”) I needed to concentrate on how to find out if she was still on Port FreeCommerce or had gone back to the Preservation Alliance without— My newsfeed search turned up a string of hits and the tagline on the top-ranked most-popular made me stop in my tracks. Luckily I was in a wide place in the mall, where the big transport lines had their offices, and the sparse crowd spread out and flowed around me. I made myself move over to the nearest office entrance, and stood in the spot where their proprietary feed was displaying advertising and informational vids. It wasn’t ideal, but I had to be somewhere where I could stand still and just concentrate on the news story. Dr. Mensah had been accused by GrayCris of corporate espionage. How the hell had we gotten to that point from the last newsburst I’d picked up here? There had been multiple lawsuits in play, but GrayCris had clearly been the aggressor in the violence against the survey teams. Besides all the other evidence, we had my feed recording and Mensah’s suit camera video of GrayCris representatives admitting guilt. Not even the cheap stupid half-assed bond company that had owned me could fuck that up. Except apparently it could. And Dr. Mensah was a planetary leader from a non-corporate political entity; how could she be charged with corporate espionage? I mean, I don’t know anything about it because we never got education modules on human law stuff, but it sounded wrong. I got past my initial outrage and managed to read the rest of the newsburst. GrayCris had made the charge, but nobody knew if they had brought an actual litigation (counterlitigation? Was that a word?) or not. It was all speculation because the journalists couldn’t find Mensah. Wait, what?
So where was she? Where were the others? Had they gone back to Preservation and left her alone? From what I’d been able to research, Preservation’s attitude to its planetary leaders was extremely casual. At home, Dr. Mensah didn’t even need security. But it was stupid to leave her alone on Port FreeCommerce where anything could happen to her. Had happened to her. I wanted to put my fist through the nearest corporate logo. Idiotic humans don’t understand how to be safe, idiotic humans thought every place was like stupid boring Preservation! I needed more info; obviously I’d missed some important developments. I worked my way back up the news timeline, searching the related tags, doing it thoroughly, trying not to panic. According to records that Port FreeCommerce had made available to get the journalists off its back, Arada, Overse, Bharadwaj, and Volescu had all left for Preservation about thirty cycles ago. Mensah was supposed to follow with the others, but hadn’t. So far so good. The next data point was buried in another story so deeply even I almost missed it. There had been a news re lease by GrayCris that Mensah had gone to TranRollinHyfa to answer their litigation, but Port FreeCommerce couldn’t confirm. Where the fuck was TranRollinHyfa? A frantic search on the public feed information bases told me TranRollinHyfa was a station, a major hub, where close to two hundred companies, including GrayCris, had their corporate headquarters. So, not exclusively enemy territory. Funny how that didn’t make me feel any better. The next relevant newsburst speculated that Mensah had gone to TranRollinHyfa to pursue testimony on behalf of Preservation and DeltFall in the suit against GrayCris. The newsburst after that speculated that she was going to testify in GrayCris’ possibly apocryphal suit against her.
Terrifyingly, the two entities that might actually know anything, the Preservation Alliance and my stupid half-assed ex-owner bond company on Port FreeCommerce, had made no official statement except to say she was definitely on TranRollinHyfa. Mensah wasn’t stupid, she would never have gone near hostile corporate territory without protection. If she had gone to TranRollinHyfa voluntarily, the bond for a trip to visit GrayCris, who had already tried to kill her once, would be expensive to buy and more expensive to execute, and the company would have to agree to anything to get her out, including sending gunships. Safer and therefore cheaper to stay on Port FreeCommerce, the bond company’s major deployment center, and make all the parties with testimony come there. That’s what the company would have insisted on. Conclusion: Mensah hadn’t gone to TranRollinHyfa voluntarily. Somebody had tricked, trapped, or forced her to go. But why? If GrayCris was going to do that, why wait so long, why give all the witnesses involved time to bring their suits and testify and give their evidence to journalists? What had happened that had panicked GrayCris so much that … Oh. Oh, shit. Chapter Two I NEEDED TO GO, and go fast. And not on a bot-piloted transport. Not finding me on Ship would throw off Palisade’s pursuit, but not for long, and if they had any brains at all they would be checking automated transports. I pulled schedules for extra-fast crewed passenger transports (No, not a direct trip. I’m apparently an idiot, but not that big an idiot.) and found one leaving in four hours heading for a major hub. From there, I could get where I needed to go. I hadn’t traveled like this before, mainly because I hadn’t wanted to. At first, I’d doubted my ability to hack weapons scanners while I was hacking the ID and payment systems. But now I had no excuse not to, thanks to Wilken and Gerth. I had ended up with their emergency go-bag, filled with hard currency cards and a variety of ID markers.
The markers are meant for subcutaneous insertion and contain identifying information. Normally they wouldn’t be readable by anything but the scanners designed for the purpose, but with a little fine-tuning my scan had been able to view the encoded data, and I had examined them all on the trip back to HaveRatton. Identity markers in the Corporation Rim usually had a lot of information on the bearer, but these were temporaries meant for travelers from outside the Rim. They had a string of numbers from a non-corporate political entity authorizing travel, place of origin, and a name. Obviously this was why Wilken and Gerth had them, so they could switch identities at need. Corporate political entities are more interested in keeping track of their own humans than anybody else’s. I had seen on the media that travel was easier for non-citizens inside the Corporation Rim than citizens, sub-citizens, and all the other categories each different political entity had to keep track of their humans. (It could be worse. At least humans could cut out their ID markers; I had corporate logos etched onto parts of me I couldn’t get rid of.) I went to a public rest area, paid for an enclosed cubicle with the hard currency card, and picked an ID with the name Jian from Parthalos Absalo. I peeled back the skin around my shoulder joint and inserted the marker under it. I had to dial down my pain receptors in that area, but there was no inconvenient leaking. I’d been pretending to be human off and on since I left Dr. Mensah, but this was the first time I’d had anything on me that officially labeled me as human. It was weird. I didn’t like it. * * * I paid for passage at a kiosk at the edge of the embarkation zone and had my new ID scanned there and at the transport’s lock when I entered. I had to hack two weapons scans, and adjust the personal scan results at the lock to show a less excessive number of augments. I’d paid for a private cabin with an attached restroom facility and automated meal delivery.
(I didn’t need the meals but it would give me something to dump in the waste recycler so the levels wouldn’t look off to anyone who checked.) The ship’s feed led me to the cabin and I saw only four humans in the corridor and heard five others as I passed a lounge. My goal was to not see them again the rest of the seven-cycle trip. The cabin was nicer than the one I’d had on my only other passenger transport. It had a bunk with a bedding packet and a small display surface, a door leading to the tiny restroom facility, a storage cabinet for personal possessions, and a meal distribution receptacle. I sealed the door, didn’t bother to sit down or even drop my bag. I had feed searches to do while we were still attached to station. I set one for TranRollinHyfa and expanded my newsburst searches with new keywords and time limits. I had already grabbed new media downloads on my walk to the embarkation zone. I knew I was going to need the distraction. I thought I knew at least part of what was going on, and it wasn’t good. From GrayCris’ perspective, these things had happened in sequence: 1) Dr. Mensah had bought a (used, somewhat battered) SecUnit, which had then disappeared, no one knew where. 2) Dr. Mensah had said, in an interview sent out in newsbursts carried by transports all across the Corporation Rim, that someone needed to investigate Milu because GrayCris abandoning a terraforming facility was suspicious. (Never mind that the journalist had brought up Milu, not her.) 3) A SecUnit had shown up on Milu and helped an assessment team contracted by GoodNightLander Independent to a) save the facility from falling into the planet, and b) acquire proof that it was an illegal mining operation and not a terraforming facility at all. The news of 3a and 3b was already in newsbursts making their way through the Corporation Rim, along with Abene and the others’ eyewitness accounts and Wilken and Gerth’s testimony about who had hired them. Obviously, GrayCris thought Mensah had sent me to Milu to fuck them over. Oops.
* * * This was a stressful trip, right up there with the one where ART introduced itself to me by implying that it might delete my brain and the one where I kept thinking about Miki. And the one with Ayres and the other humans who had sold themselves into contract slavery. I guess most of my trips so far had been this stressful. This time it was anxiety, and I did what I always do, which is watch media. One of the new shows I’d downloaded randomly at HaveRatton turned out to be a long historical drama about early human exploration in space. It was listed as a fictionalized documentary (I’m not sure what that means, either) but there were attached sidebars throughout with info about the real history, which were supposedly accurate. It was odd to see that there had been a variation of SecUnits back then. They didn’t use cloned human parts, but actual human parts from humans who had catastrophic injuries or illnesses, and had decided to have their parts used for what they called Augmented Rovers. Some of the humans in the primary story line had actually known one of the ARs when it was a human, and they were all still friends. The ARs weren’t humanform, but got to choose their assignments and which humans they worked with. They talked back and forth with the humans, gave advice, sometimes led rescue parties, and saved the day a lot. Despite all the convincingly informative sidebars, I had trouble believing it was true. I stopped in the middle of the second episode and switched to a musical comedy. Anyway, there was a difference in watching media because I was safe on a transport with no one making me do anything, and watching media because I was trying not to think about all the ways I’d screwed up and what might happen next, a future that was bound to include even more creative screw-ups on my part. I had gotten used to the former and I hated going back to the latter. I did try to prepare.
I pulled everything the transport’s feed had on TranRollinHyfa, which wasn’t much more than an updated version of the standard tourist packet that I had already downloaded from HaveRatton, but it did give me the names of a lot of the corporations that had bases or headquarters there. The security company Palisade had a large office there. Why was that not a surprise? I also did a lot of work on my code for beating security cameras. I had developed it on RaviHyral right before almost getting my client Tapan killed. It was a method for deleting me from the camera’s recording and replacing me with images before and after I walked past. It wasn’t perfect, and I worked on making it better, adding code to work with different types and brands of SecSystems, and a greater number of cameras and angles. When we came through the wormhole, I was just glad the first leg of the trip was over. Nobody was waiting for me when we docked at the transit hub so at least that told me that Wilken and Gerth’s IDs were good. I only spent ten hours there, all of it in a tiny room in a transient hostel. I downloaded some new shows, but I spent most of the time pulling files from information bases for anything on TranRollinHyfa. This took longer since most of the bases I needed access to were proprietary corporate ones and I had to hack my way in before I could even tell if they had what I was looking for or not. I also ran my usual searches on newsbursts. (Nothing new on Mensah except lots of speculation that didn’t help my anxiety level.) When it was almost time to go, I traded out the Jian ID for one with the name Kiran. I had contemplated one more obfuscating hop, but I didn’t know what was happening with Mensah and the thought that I might already be too late wasn’t helpful. So I booked a passage on another fast passenger transport direct to TranRollinHyfa. I hesitated over my memory clips from Milu, the ones still hidden in my arm and Wilken and Gerth’s clip. I didn’t know how useful the information was anymore.
But Miki had died for that information, whether it knew it or not. Taking it into GrayCris territory with me would be stupid. In the transient room, I removed the clips from my arm, then left for the embarkation zone. On the way, I stopped at a shipping kiosk and bought a small parcel package. I rolled the clips up in the protective wrapper, included Wilken and Gerth’s clip, and sealed the container. I addressed it to all of Dr. Mensah’s marital partners on their farm on Preservation. (I had all the info for the shipping form, lying around in longterm memory storage, from my old company’s records of PreservationAux. Wow, that seemed like a long time ago.) I’d boarded my next passenger transport and was hiding in my private cabin when I caught a new newsburst, relayed from a ship that had just come in to dock. It was a brief statement from the Preservation Alliance by Dr. Bharadwaj. It was unexpectedly odd to see a familiar human, even if she looked really angry. All she said was that Preservation was “taking steps” to resolve the issues with GrayCris. Huh. I lay down on the bunk and stared at the metal ceiling. There was a background buzz of traffic in the ship’s public feed as the docking clamps were released. I was monitoring the private activity to make sure no one was chatting about the SecUnit hiding in a passenger cabin incompetently pretending to be human. I replayed Bharadwaj’s statement seven times. I might be wrong. I knew interpreting the emotional subtext in the speech and appearance of real humans was completely different from interpreting it in shows and serials. (For one thing, the shows and serials were trying to communicate accurately with the viewer.
As far as I could tell, real humans usually didn’t know what the hell they were doing.) But the interpretation I wanted to make of Bharadwaj’s vid statement was that Mensah was being held by GrayCris, who had threatened her life if Preservation didn’t make a formal statement at least implying that they were in amicable negotiations to settle with GrayCris. I looked back over the newsburst that had accompanied it and found there was still no statement by DeltFall, whose survey team GrayCris had slaughtered. Or my ex-owner the company, which was probably torn between fury and shitting itself over the amount of equipment and bond payments lost in the debacle and desperate to have someone pay for it. I mean, literally pay for it. GrayCris could buy the company off for a big enough credit payout but so far it hadn’t done that. But maybe GrayCris couldn’t afford that payout. GrayCris had done all this to acquire strange synthetics, alien remnants. Now that everybody knew that, they couldn’t sell them, or develop them, or whatever they had been planning to do with them. It meant they were desperate, too. That wasn’t good. * * * After four cycles by ship’s local time, the passenger transport came through the wormhole and I picked up the edge of the TranRollinHyfa Station feed. It looked bigger up close. The station itself was larger than Port FreeCommerce, with three interconnected transit rings below the main hull. Usually the transit ring circles the station, with the main part where humans and augmented humans live or do whatever in the center. Or, I guess, I’ve never been in those parts except for the deployment center on Port FreeCommerce, which was near the transit ring. I picked up the feed but it was crammed with advertising, with the transit schedules and service listings swamped by corporation ads that were dissolving into static because other corporations had paid fees to drown them out. Well, that was all useless. I dropped it and picked up the ship’s comm, which was monitoring the Port Authority’s feed.
There were still ads, but at least the PA was able to get a word in edgewise every now and then. One of those words was a navigation alert and— Huh. I pulled it up on the transport’s feed, where the scan and nav was running for the crew. There was a company gunship hanging off the station. Not on approach, not waiting for a docking slot. Just maintaining position. There was no mistake about who owned it, the navigation alert included the stupid logo the gunship was broadcasting in its otherwise blocked feed, the same logo etched into my non-organic parts. I checked the alert’s timestamp. Converted to my local time it equaled twenty cycles, give or take. It could have been here for another contract, but that seemed like a big coincidence. Gunships don’t have any other purpose except to go fast and blow stuff up, and contracts for them are tricky, because of the treaties between corporate and non-corporate political entities. I had thought that if Mensah had actually gone to TranRollinHyfa voluntarily to negotiate with GrayCris, then the bond might have been high enough to require a gunship. But then why wasn’t it docked? Did Mensah need rescuing or what? I needed intel, and there was one way to get it. The station approach traffic was heavy, and we were showing a twenty-seven-minute docking delay. Twenty-seven minutes was more than enough time for me to do something stupid. I sank into the ship’s comm. The approach protocol the PA had managed to slip out between ads stipulated that comms be set to monitor all signal traffic, voice and feed. This was so ships could bypass the choked station feed and pick up any alerts or alarms the other ships might broadcast. It was harder to sort and separate them without the comm system assisting but I knew what I was looking for. After six minutes I found it: the company gunship’s encrypted feed, twined around its comm signal like the melody in a music sample. I pulled the feed in and applied the key, and—this could be a mistake, did I need intel this badly? Yeah, yeah, I did.
I needed to know if Mensah was here on a mission or under duress—I sent the gunship’s bot pilot a ping and added the code that would tell it I was in stealth mode. It acknowledged. It recognized me as also company property, since I had the decryption key and I was using the right salutation. I didn’t think it would notify its crew that it had been contacted by what it had every reason to identify as another company bot, not unless someone had told it to. Another SecUnit would have reported me immediately, but then a SecUnit would have known what I was and that I shouldn’t be out here. I waited, listening in to make sure no one had noticed the offsite connection. No alarms were raised. I could tell feed traffic aboard the ship was light, and mostly in standby mode. They were waiting for something. I mentally braced myself and sent the bot pilot Status: update (stealth). After a long three seconds, it returned a databurst. I sent an acknowledgment and broke free of the connection. I focused on the ceiling of the cabin again. If I was lucky, nobody would check the bot pilot’s contact log. The company had been paid for me and taken me off inventory, but I had no legal status in corporate territory without Mensah. If they realized I was here, they could report me to station authorities, or decide to catch me and forcibly separate me into my component parts, or anything in between. I checked the databurst for tracers and malware and then unpacked it. Well, this was … potentially a disaster. Shortly after the gunship had arrived at TranRollinHyfa, the contract status had gone from Retrieve: Active to Retrieve: Suspended Due to Neutral Party Access Denial, Escalation Out of Contracted Parameters. That meant that the gunship had been sent to retrieve an endangered client, but the operation had been halted because the retrieval had been blocked, and by something other than just being beyond the range of the client’s ability to pay.
The client ID code was Mensah’s, the same one from my contract, which meant this was an extension of her original safety bond for the planetary survey. Which, okay, I didn’t know it worked like that, but it was confirmation Mensah was here, or at least that the company’s current intel thought she was here. And the fucking gunship was sitting out here not doing anything about it. I’m guessing GrayCris had somehow gotten TranRollinHyfa to refuse docking and operational permission, meaning the company couldn’t land its armed retrieval team without fighting TRH station security and the company hadn’t been paid enough to do that. The other code in the status was Secondary Clients Status: Recognizance. That was almost worse—it meant someone else named in the bond (probably Pin-Lee, Ratthi, or Gurathin, since they hadn’t been listed in the newsburst as returning to Preservation) had left company protection and were in the wind. There was only one way to be in the wind between a gunship and an armed station: they must have taken a shuttle, certified themselves as unarmed to get past the operational prohibition, and been allowed to dock. So that was four of them I had to worry about. * * * Waiting was stressful, and I watched an episode of my favorite, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, while the transport finished its approach and went through docking procedures. Then the ship’s feed signaled that it was time to disembark. One reason I’d picked this particular fast non-bot-piloted transport out of the others heading here was because there were 127 passengers, forty-three of whom were traveling together. They didn’t disappoint me and disembarked in a single noisy confused mob. I walked out surrounded by them and was across the embarkation floor and up into the transparent pipe of the elevated walkway before they became distracted by the vending and advertising bays and started to thin out. I kept walking.
By that point I’d deflected three weapons scans and had hacked the restricted feeds for the various drone security cameras. The security was tighter for disembarking passengers than the other transit rings and stations I’d visited. Unusually tight for a station that sold its public feed for ads that drowned out the safety info and official announcements. (You could tell which humans and augmented humans were trying to use its mapping function because they kept walking up to blocked exits and walls.) I had also been hit by at least four different recognition scans. These scans are usually searching for known humans or augmented humans that the station security is keeping tabs on, not random escaped SecUnits. (Random escaped SecUnits is not nearly as prevalent a problem as the entertainment feed would have you believe.) But I was glad I’d listened to ART and let it change my configuration. I was glad for every single precaution I’d taken, even the ones that had seemed paranoid at the time. I didn’t spot any armed security patrols but there were extra drones, small ones, a different brand and configuration than the ones I was used to. After I modified my queries to block the stupid ads, I got a download and search of the news feed started, as well as the port’s public dock assignment list. I checked the port map that had managed to fight its way through the advertising chaff, and took the walkway heading up into the station mall. My transport had docked on the second transit ring, so there were a lot of ramps to walk up, if you didn’t want to take the lift pods, which I didn’t. I wasn’t catching pings, but a check of the station directory showed two security companies based here who had SecUnits available for rental, EinoArzu and Stockade Kumaran. Palisade was listed as a security company, but not as a company that supplied SecUnits. That didn’t necessarily mean they didn’t have them, it just meant they didn’t advertise them. I wasn’t too worried about SecUnits being used against me at this point.
SecUnits would be able to identify me as a rogue unit on sight (or on ping, more accurately) but we were never used on transit rings. The security companies would ship us (them) through the port as cargo, to keep from panicking the humans. I mean, there’s a first time for everything, but it just wasn’t likely, maybe a fifteen percent chance at best. Even if they did deploy, they still had to find me. The governor modules wouldn’t let the SecUnits hack systems or search for my hacks, not on their own without human direction. (And I didn’t think GrayCris had any idea how much hacking I was responsible for.) Only combat SecUnits could detect or counteract my hacks without a human supervisor. Still, my human skin was prickling with nerves. The extra security seemed to support a theory I had. Or maybe I mean a hypothesis. Whatever, the idea was that if Bharadwaj’s statement in the newsburst had been a message to GrayCris, a sign that Preservation would cooperate to save Dr. Mensah, then the stories about Mensah being arrested, about her going to or somehow being taken to TranRollinHyfa were messages, too. Messages to me. GrayCris thought the newsbursts were how Mensah had ordered me to go to Milu, so it stood to reason they would use newsbursts to lure me here. It wasn’t a great theory/hypothesis. They had Mensah, so I don’t know why they would want me. They knew I’d been on Milu, did they suspect I had left with an armful of incriminating data? But GoodNightLander Independent had Milu now and would hopefully be mad enough to look for incriminating data of their own, so they could publicly complain about it on their own newsfeeds. GrayCris going after me and Mensah wasn’t going to stop that. But they were humans—who knows why they did anything? It made it all the more obvious that now that I’d gotten in here, I needed to make sure I could get out. Speaking of which, I pulled specs and info from the security feeds I’d accessed, and tagged it to work on later.
I walked up the last ramp surrounded by a crowd of humans and augmented humans, and on into the station mall. There was no fringe travelers’ area, with cheap transient hostels and vending kiosks. It went straight into multi-levels of expensive shops and offices, most in spheres, stacked into looming towers or hovering overhead. The feed was a maze of vids and ads and instructions and music, competing with the floating display surfaces and the holosculptures of giant waterfalls and trees and abstract art things. I’d seen similar, and better, on my shows, but seeing it in person was different. My camera angles weren’t as good, for one thing. And the humans and augmented humans wandering around randomly were distracting from the view. Oh, and there were downloads, sweet downloads, multiple entertainment feeds, way more than HaveRatton and Port FreeCommerce, hanging temptingly in the air. I picked a couple at random and started downloads. One of my queries had pulled up the station’s actual index for residents, not the abbreviated one for tourists and transients, and I needed a place to stand still to review it. I headed toward one of the lower-level spheres. It was a big shop, with lots of humans and augmented humans going in and out. I could do a shop. I’d done shops (one shop) before. No problem. I tried to relax and look preoccupied as I took the ramp up to the entrance. The shop’s feed ads said it sold advanced lifestyles. I don’t know what that is and the explanations in the feed weren’t helpful. Even some of the humans wandering around looked confused. I wandered with them into a central area where humans were watching a hovering display of products? Art and music inspired by products? It wasn’t the enclosed booth I was hoping for, but it gave me a reason to stand still and stare while I reviewed my query results and the station index. Not a surprise, I had turned up a dock listing for a shuttle with a company ID code, the only company code in the arrivals index.
That was the shuttle the Preservation team had used to get here from the gunship. It was … strange, knowing they were so close. Considering the size of the shuttle, they probably weren’t staying on board. After a little delicate unraveling of the Port Authority’s protected systems, I got a download of the docking contact index and matched the shuttle’s entry with a physical address in a station hotel. Three newssearch results popped up while I was deleting any trace of my intrusion from the PA’s system, but they were old newsbursts from Port FreeCommerce. Just more useless speculation on where Mensah was and what she was doing, why she had disappeared. None of my queries had turned up any mention of her. I didn’t have a lot of choice. The team from Preservation must be here to negotiate for Mensah’s release, the only way they could proceed until Preservation scraped up enough currency to pay the company to violate TranRollinHyfa’s docking ban. I needed intel before I could do anything, and they were my only potential source. I left the shop, first making sure to do one loop of the aimless wander around the displays that the humans were doing. I had to go meet some old friends. Chapter Three THE HOTEL WAS AT the far end of the station mall, in a quieter area with 60 percent less foot and drone traffic, next to a multi-level plaza. All the structures around it were office blocks or hotels, all were shaped like giant cones or cylinders, except for one either iconoclast or outdated sphere, which seemed to be holding on to its real estate despite the fact that the station had tried to block it from view with a large holo forest display. I crossed one of the multi-level plazas, where humans and augmented humans were sitting singly and in groups at scattered tables and chairs, talking, viewing entertainment media on the displays, or working in their feeds. Surveillance was tight so I started one of the new codes I had written on the way here. I had been thinking about other ways to look less like a SecUnit.
(An obvious option was to pretend to eat or drink something, but that was tricky. I can do that if I have to, but only for a limited time. I don’t have anything like a digestive system so I have to segregate a section of my lung to store it until I can expel it. Yes, it’s just as awful as it sounds.) I’d decided on something more subtle and less disgusting. Humans, even augmented humans, subvocalize when they speak on the feed. I had written a quick set of code that I could run in background to mimic those jaw movements. (I pulled a selection of conversations from Sanctuary Moon, Legends of the Fire, and Toward Tomorrow to use as a template for the movements.) As I crossed the plaza toward the hotel I made sure my shoulders were relaxed and my expression was distracted. I picked up a camera feed from one of the drones watching the plaza for a look. Operating in concert with my code to mimic human breathing patterns and small random movements, it was perfect. Well, perfect for me. Let’s say 98 percent perfect. The Preservation group’s hotel had a big terraced entrance with transparent walls and a wide doorway. A track for the station’s pipe transport ran through a transparent upper floor of the structure, so you could see passengers disembarking and boarding inside when the chain of pipe capsules arrived. (I could see them via the higher-flying drones; the other humans in the plaza couldn’t.) I identified two potential hostiles sitting at tables in the plaza. At the hotel entrance, I blended with a crowd of humans and augmented humans who were watching a floating advertising display that was showing funny short videos. (Some were pretty good so I saved them to permanent storage.) It also gave me a place to stand while I worked my way into the hotel’s security system. I had the improved version of my RaviHyral code routine to remove myself from camera views ready to deploy if needed. When the video display started to repeat, I followed another group of humans through the entrance.
I probably sound confident, but the scan at the arched doorway made my human skin prickle. I knew the kind of chance I was taking in coming here. The lobby was a series of wide platforms with seating. It also had giant hanging biospheres full of simulated planetary skies, all displaying different weather. Ostensibly they were there to obscure the view of the seating platforms and provide some privacy, but they actually had the security system’s cameras and scanners along the rims. As I watched myself through the cameras I spotted four more potential hostiles, all augmented humans. One was clearly in the feed, reviewing the scan results, and the others were moving around, doing visual sweeps. No telling if they were GrayCris or Palisade, though if they were the hotel would know they were here. I couldn’t tell if they were looking for me; there were no standing alerts in the security comm feed. Though from their affect they were paying close attention to augmented humans wearing any kind of hood, hat, or scarf, or face-obscuring tattoos, cosmetics, or ornaments. Me, a generic type augmented human person with my hood folded down on my back, didn’t get a second glance. This is why humans shouldn’t do their own security. I went up the ramp to the check-in platform, followed the directional feed with its welcoming musical theme and instructions to a kiosk, and booked a room with one of Gerth’s hard currency cards. Yes, I did enjoy doing that. I took the rear exit off the platform to the pod junction and followed five humans into the first pod to arrive. It was a limited system, no outside connections, and would only take you to the room section now tied to your ID marker by the hotel’s feed, or the lobbies and public entertainment sections. The pod took us to our sections in order of arrival, so it gave me a chance to watch the system in operation and copy its code. It took me to my section and I followed the feed map to my room.
It opened at the authorization the hotel had attached to my ID marker and at that brilliant moment I discovered there were no interior camera views or audio surveillance. Stupid hotel. I had probably even paid extra for it. Still, the room was bigger and much nicer than the cabins I’d had on the passenger transports. I did a quick walk-through to scan for anomalies, then dropped my bag and lay down on the bed. (It was huge. Why have a bed that could easily accommodate four medium to large humans when you only had one hook for towels in the bath facility? Were the humans supposed to share the towel?) The wall across from the unnecessarily large bed was all display surface. To keep me company, I sent an episode of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon to it to play—holy shit, the humans were almost actual size in the long shots—and then I got to work. So there were no camera feeds from the rooms, but the cameras in the corridors were picking up humans and augmented humans as they moved through the connecting passages and used the transport pods to go to and from the lobbies and the three sections of food and club areas. (Whatever “clubs” were. The things going on there didn’t seem to match my lexicon definition.) There was also a transport link to the pipe train level. I worked my way carefully into the system, alert for traps. Without room cameras I was going to have to do this the hard way. Like most surveillance systems on non-secure installations, this one didn’t save their recordings permanently and supposedly deleted their archives after a waiting period. Note I said “supposedly.” Of course, the hotel was datamining. The mining was only on the conversations in the public areas and corridors, but then that was what I needed.
I found the stored archives from the past twenty cycles, took over one of the routines that was processing it (it was separating out the boring bits from the juicy business conversations that would need to be sent to a human or bot monitor for review), and redirected it to search for my keyword set. Eight minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, my captured routine turned up a sizable set of hits. I got the timestamps, then released the routine back to its job of searching for proprietary financial information. The timestamps let me know which archives to check for the camera surveillance. I made some room in my temp storage, downloaded the first archive, and started my scans. I was reviewing it all myself instead of using a quicker and more efficient facial recognition scan on the collected data. That type of scan is only 62 percent reliable under most conditions and while that’s fine for half-assed company security work, I didn’t want to miss my targets. It turned out I could have started there instead of wasting the eight minutes, because in the first pass I caught an image of Ratthi in a corridor, walking toward a pod junction, timestamp sixteen hours and twenty-seven minutes minus present time. Gotcha. I kept reviewing the surveillance. Ratthi should have put in some time reviewing it, too, or at least looking around a little, because two potential hostiles followed him to the junction. They didn’t try to get on the same pod, but they clearly had access to the security system, because they were there when I picked Ratthi up in the lobby again. They followed him to the stores and vending areas in the hotel’s lower level, then back to his room. Now that I knew to focus on that section of the hotel, I was able to eliminate a lot of video from other camera feeds, and within three minutes I picked up both Gurathin and Pin-Lee. All three were being followed, whenever they went out. This wasn’t unexpected, given that GrayCris had to know they were here.

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