him across the Russian border in disguise. He reached
the seaport of Pillau, found his wife and his dog there, and set sail
in a small boat.

Thus he embarked for the future, "with a wife, an opera and a half, a
small purse, and a terribly large and terribly voracious Newfoundland
dog." The composer, his wife, and the dog were all three outrageously
seasick. They arrived finally after violent storms in London, where the
chief event was the loss of the dog. When he came back, the three
decided that Paris offered a better chance, so thither they went.
Meyerbeer befriended them with letters of introduction and much
encouragement, on the receipt of which the cautious couple diluted
their few remaining pence in champagne.

Wagner began to write songs, which he offered to sell for prices
ranging from $2.50 to $4.00; he asked the publisher obligingly to grant
him the latter sum, "as life in Paris is enormously expensive"!

Wagner was so poor that about the only thing he could afford to keep
was a diary. Here he wrote down alternate accounts of his abject
poverty and of his abnormal hopes. In Villon's time, the wolves used to
come into the streets of Paris at night. They were not all dead by
1840, it would seem, for one of them made his home on Wagner's
door-step. He wrote in his diary that he had invited a sick and
starving German workman to breakfast, and his wife informed him that
there was to be no breakfast, as the last pennies were gone.

In one of his moments of desperation, he brought himself to the depth
of asking Minna to pawn some of her jewelry. She told him that she had
long ago pawned it all. She faced their distress like a heroine. Wagner
used to weep when he told of her self-denial, and the cheerfulness with
which she, the pretty actress of former days, cooked what meals there
were to cook, and scrubbed what clothes there were to scrub. For
diversion, when they had no money for theatres and the opera, the
genius and his wife and the dog could always take a walk on the
boulevard.

Wagner could not play any instrument, not even a piano, and so he tried
for a position in the chorus of a cheap theatre; but his voice was not
found good enough for even that. His long sea voyage had given him an
idea for an opera, "The Flying Dutchman." He was driven to sell his
libretto for a hundred dollars to another composer.

It would not do to follow Wagner's artistic progress in this place;
that is an epic in itself. Fina