Among the attacks made on Wagner at this time was the charge that,
while he was lolling on a silken couch which had cost him $12,000, his
neglected wife was starving to death in Dresden. Minna was honourable
enough to answer this attack with an open letter to those German
newspapers which, in 1866, outjaundiced that yellow journalism for the
invention of which New America has been blamed.

Minna wrote as follows:

"The malicious rumours concerning my husband, which have been for some
time published by Vienna and Munich newspapers, oblige me to declare
that I have received from him up to this day an income amply sufficient
for my maintenance. I take this opportunity with the more pleasure as
it enables me to put an end to at least one of the numerous calumnies
launched against my husband."

A few weeks later, on January 25, 1866, she died at Dresden of heart
disease. She had suffered all the miseries that earn success, without
ever tasting their sweets. To say whether or not she deserved to taste
the sweets would demand a more ruthless and unforgiving verdict upon
one of the two unfortunates than I have the heart to render. The
marriage had been the wedding of a near-sighted woman and a man who
could see hardly anything nearer than the Pleiades. Neither was more to
blame than the other for the fault of eyesight. It was simply a case of
connubial astigmatism.

While Wagner was living on terms of strange intimacy with the young
king, he was accused of Oriental luxury. The selection of the rainbow
furnishings of his house and of his own dressing-gowns, which made
Joseph's coat mere negligee, was not altogether his own, but showed the
unmistakable guiding hand of a woman. Frau Cosima von Buelow acted as a
sort of secretary to Wagner. She was the daughter of Liszt; her mother
was the Comtesse d'Agoult, who wrote under the name of "Daniel Stern,"
and with whom Liszt had lived for a few years. Cosima had married Hans
von Buelow in 1857.

Von Buelow had in his earlier years been greatly befriended by Liszt and
by Wagner. In 1850, when Von Buelow was about twenty years old, Wagner
and Liszt both had written to his mother, who was then divorced,
begging her to let her son take up music. Like Schumann's mother, she
opposed music as a career, but Von Buelow persisted, and became Liszt's
pupil. Wagner was to Von Buelow a god. It was a pitiful practical joke
that Fate should have directed the god's favour toward the worshipper'