sional chief of the police "of
public safety." Who kept the public safe from the police I am unable
to say. Fighting was going on perpetually in the neighbourhood; the
dead and dying lay scattered in all directions; the stench bred
epidemics more murderous than all Napoleon's cannon. Friedrich must
have found his hands full day and night. Richard was baptized on
August 16; the following day Napoleon won a victory which cost him
dear; the 18th, being Sunday, was observed as such by a soldiery in
need of a rest; on the 19th Napoleon was a beaten man, and ran to save
his skin past the windows of the house of the Red and White Lion on
the Bruehl. Richard's mother had been trembling for her own safety and
that of her children and husband; but when, as she herself afterwards
told, she saw the dreaded conqueror bolt in haste without his hat, she
breathed again. Whether she and the family were any better off under
the deliverers is a question that does not concern us here: the point
is that she thought she was. It was all one to Richard, who, aged
three months, slept peacefully on.

After the deliverance Friedrich's work became even heavier than
before. The town through its length and breadth was shattered and
dilapidated; whole families were homeless and packed like rabbits in
hutches; the slaughtered dead, men and beasts, could not be buried
quick enough; black death stalked abroad in the guise of what was
called hospital typhus--an epidemic fever of some kind. After the
French flight, I take it, provisional chief-policeman Wagner had
returned to his deputy-registrarship; but his toils were none the
lighter for that. He exhausted himself; the appalling fever attacked
him and he had no strength to resist it; and he died on November 22,
exactly six months after the birth of Richard. Wagner's ill-luck, his
wicked fairy, struck her first blow while his age had to be reckoned
in months; she went on striking, and never ceased to strike, until he
was beginning to grow a little weary and his age was reckoned in
decades of years, and in terms of masterpieces accomplished and
insults and ill-usage by no means patiently borne. It must have seemed
hard to his widowed mother, after the uncertainties and horrors of the
last years, that when at last a period of happy peace seemed about to
dawn, uncertainties and griefs and worries of a fresh sort should come
upon her.

Whether Frau Wagner ever actually drew any pension from the good
burg