The young couple lived at Riga in an expensive suburb, whence it was said they could reach the theatre only by means of a cab, though Glasenapp denies this story.  Minna brought to her husband not a penny of dowry, and he brought to her a number of debts, and a hopeless lack of economy.  The first year he tried to get an advance of salary, and offered to do anything, “except bootblacking and water-carrying, which latter my chest could not endure at present.”  Then he decided that fame and fortune awaited him, as they usually do, just over the horizon.  The only trouble with the horizon, as with to-morrow and the will-o’-the-wisp, is that it is always just ahead.

When the Wagners applied for a passport, to leave Riga, they did so in the face of certain suits for debt.  They were told that they could have the passport as soon as they showed receipts for their bills.  That was too ridiculous a condition to consider, so Minna disguised as a peasant woman, and a friendly lumberman took her across the border as his wife.  The friends of Wagner took up a purse for him, and by elaborate manoeuvres got 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.