Note 73 — Chapter I · THE MAN

Wagner writes thus to Otto Wesendonck on the 25th June 1861, seventeen days before the letter to Mathilde: "In this anxious time [the Paris Tannhäuser fiasco had occurred three months before, and his prospects were unusually black], when any resolution is impossible for me, and I am incapable of any mental effort, everything conspires to grieve me. The dear little dog that you once gave me died the day before yesterday, quite suddenly and in an almost inexplicable way. I had become so used to the gentle animal, and the manner of its death, everything, distressed me greatly." Briefe Richard Wagners an Otto Wesendonck, pp. 99, 100.