ran to save his skin past the windows of the house of the Red and White Lion on the Bruehl.  Richard’s mother had been trembling for her own safety and that of her children and husband; but when, as she herself afterwards told, she saw the dreaded conqueror bolt in haste without his hat, she breathed again.  Whether she and the family were any better off under the deliverers is a question that does not concern us here:  the point is that she thought she was.  It was all one to Richard, who, aged three months, slept peacefully on.

After the deliverance Friedrich’s work became even heavier than before.  The town through its length and breadth was shattered and dilapidated; whole families were homeless and packed like rabbits in 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 local reputation.  We know what was thought of his histrionic gifts from more or less competent contemporaries; but what to think of his paintings I do not know, for two reasons:  I do not trust my own judgment in such a matter, and if I did, I have never seen any of Geyer’s work.  Of this, however, I am very sure:  he cannot have been a good painter unless nature had worked a miracle