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
burghers of Leipzig or the greedy state officials of Saxony seems,
when all is said, very uncertain. In such times of stress and struggle
great crown officers, laudably anxious about their own interests and
the interests of their families, are apt to be rather careless, not to
say callous, about the smaller fry. However, pension or no pension,
with the aid of relatives and friends the Wagners pulled through.
Chief and best amongst the friends was Ludwig Geyer.

A few words must be said about him. Born in 1780, he was ten years
Carl Friedrich's junior. An actor who had taken up painting, or a
painter who had taken up acting, in both arts he had won at any rate a