I had already got far on into the first act when the momentous New Year’s Day of 1862 arrived, and I paid my long-delayed visit to Princess Metternich.  I found her very naturally embarrassed, but I quite cheerfully accepted her assurances of regret at being obliged to withdraw her invitation owing to circumstances with which I was already acquainted, and I did my utmost to reassure her.  I also begged Count Hatzfeld to inform me when Countess Pourtales would feel equal to receiving me.

Thus through the whole month of January I continued working on the Meistersinger libretto, and completed it in exactly thirty days.  The melody for the fragment of Sachs’s poem on the Reformation, with which I make my characters in the last act greet their beloved master, occurred to me on the way to the Taverne Anglaise, whilst strolling through the galleries of the Palais Royal.  There I found Truinet already waiting for me, and asked him to give me a scrap of paper and a pencil to jot down my melody, which I quietly hummed over to him at the time.  I usually accompanied him and his father along the boulevards to his flat in the Faubourg St. Honore, and on that evening he could do nothing but exclaim, ‘Mais, quelle gaite d’esprit, cher maitre!’

The nearer my work approached its termination, the more earnestly had I to think about a place of abode.  I still imagined that something similar to what I had lost by Liszt’s abandonment of the Altenburg was in store for me.  I now remembered that in the previous year I had received a most pressing invitation from Mme. Street, to pay her and her father a long visit in Brussels; on the strength of which I wrote to the lady and asked if she could put me up for a time without any ceremony.  She was en desolation at being obliged to deny my wish.  I next turned to Cosima, who was in Berlin, with a similar request, at which she seemed to be quite alarmed, but I quite understood the reason of this when, on visiting Berlin later on, I saw the style of Bulow’s quarters.  It struck me as very strange, on the other hand, that my brother-in-law Avenarius, who, I heard, was very comfortably settled in Berlin, begged me most earnestly to go to him, and judge for myself whether I could not pay him a long visit.  My sister Cecilia, however, forbade me to take Minna there, although she thought she could find her a lodging in the immediate neighbourhood if she wanted to visit Berlin.  Unfortunately for herself, poor Minna could find nothing better to do than to write me a furious letter about my sister’s cruel behaviour to her, so the possibility of a renewal of our old squabbles deterred me at once from accepting my brother-in-law’s proposal.  At last I bethought me of looking out for a quiet retreat in the neighbourhood of Mayence, under the financial protection of Schott.  He had spoken to me about a pretty estate there belonging to the young Baron von Hornstein.  I thought I was conferring an honour upon the latter when I wrote to him at Munich