Note 164 — Chapter I · THE MAN (continued 2)

I do not know that Mr. Ashton Ellis is justified in assuming that "Wagner at last made his bosom friend [Liszt] a confidant and counsellor," on the basis of the letter to Liszt of [5?] November 1857 which he quotes: "Now take my hand, and take my kiss; a kiss such as you gave me a year ago, when you accompanied me home one night—you remember, after I had told my doleful tale to both of you. However much it may lose its impression on me,—what you were to me that night, the wondrous sympathy that lay in what you told me as we walked,—this heavenliness in your nature will follow with me, as my most splendid memory, to each future existence." (Op. cit., lvii.) What Mr. Ellis translates as "told my doleful tale to you both," is in the German "nachdem ich Euch bei Dir meine traurige Geschichte von Bordeaux erzählt" ("after I had told you both my mournful Bordeaux story"). Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt, ii. 181. Wagner's confidence and Liszt's sympathy were apparently as much in connection with the Laussot affair as with the other. But the words "von Bordeaux" were suppressed in the first edition of the letters.