Chapter IX

At the end of the drawing-room at Tribschen, to the left in coming from the garden, a heavy portière, raised by a cord, allowed one a glimpse of a very small room, which I could not approach without great emotion. It was the sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, the work-room of Richard Wagner! Sombre draperies, a restrained half-light, two walls covered with book-shelves, filled with splendid works: music, poetry, philosophy; a piano of a special design (almost an altar), furnished with drawers and a plane like a table; a single picture, the portrait of Ludwig II., the royal friend, the ministering spirit: "The man who," said Wagner, "seems to have been sent to me from heaven!" What a beautiful, refined face! how the brown tint of the skin and the black hair bring out the splendid clearness of the eyes, of a polar blue, and sparkling with enthusiasm--eyes that seem supernatural.

One and all we love him, this young man; we consider him as our king, our chief and our ally, since he has the same faith as ourselves, and, like us, is in the ranks of the disciples. We were destined for the same mission: to affirm the divinity of a man of genius, to be the mirrors reflecting for him the splendour of his dreams; assuring him of the certainty of his power; soldiers ready to endure insults and blows in his defence, who would gladly fall for his glory. And this king is stronger than we are for the combat; his sceptre bears more weight than our fists. Sometimes escaping from the court, the royal friend came, alone and incognito, to Tribschen, to celebrate the Master's birthday, or to bring some good tidings. As the house was not large, it was in this little room that they arranged a cot-bed for him. And here he spent several days, very happy, and asking only to be treated as a humble disciple.

Wagner surprised me to-day, on the threshold of this little study, this sanctuary (into which I dared not go), contemplating the piano, the scattered sheets, where the ink was scarcely dry, agitated to the last degree by the human details of the thing that seemed to me so completely superhuman. And I was overcome, almost to suffocation, by hearing suddenly close by my side the voice and the laugh of him who seemed to me, as I looked back through the ages, to stand with Homer, Æschylus, Shakespeare, and to be the one whom I would still have acclaimed as the greatest of all.

"How enthusiastic you are!" cried he. "You must not be too much so, or your health will suffer." He spoke jestingly, but the kind light in his eyes told me much that his laugh disguised.

X

"This morning," said Wagner to me, "my domestic, Jacob, declared that I must pass the whole day without him, because he was going to Zug."

"'Zug! Zug!'" That word is on the lips of everyone in Lucerne. We hear it constantly, and I thought it an exclamation, a soothing word, familiar to the Swiss, something like 'Zut.'"

"Not at all. Zug is a little village, very near here."

"And what is there so attractive about it?"

"Not much, ordinarily; but evidently you do not know that the Federal shooting-match has begun at Zug. It is the event of all others that develops to its utmost the enthusiasm of all the cantons. A hundred thousand francs in prizes, thirty thousand rifles all together. Seriously, it is curious and interesting, and you ought to see it."

It was in obedience to the Master's counsel, and not without regret at leaving him, that we alighted a few hours later, at the Zug station.