Hornstein now behaved properly and desired to go to Lausanne via Vevey.  We did part of the journey together on foot, and his quaint appearance with his knapsack on his back was most amusing. continued my journey alone from Berne to Lucerne, taking the shortest possible route to Selisberg on the Lake of Lucerne, where my wife was staying for a sour-milk cure.

The symptoms of heart disease, which I had already noticed some time previously, had increased, and this place had been recommended to her as specially invigorating and beneficial.  With great patience I endured several weeks of life at a Swiss pension, but my wife, who had quite adapted herself to the ways of the house and seemed very comfortable, looked upon me as a disturbing element.

I found this a great trial, although the beautiful air and my daily excursions into the mountains did me a great deal of good.  I even went so far as to choose a very wild spot, where, in imagination, I ordered a little house to be built in which I should be able to work in absolute peace.

Towards the end of July we went back to Zurich.  I returned to my Walkure and finished the first act in the month of August.  I was terribly depressed by my worries just at this time, and as it was more than ever necessary for me to have absolute quiet for my work, I at once agreed to my wife’s departure, when she told me of her intended visit to her relations and friends in Dresden and Zwickau.  She left me at the beginning of September, and wrote to me about her stay in Weimar, where the Princess Wittgenstein had received her with the greatest hospitality at Altenburg Castle.  There she met Rockel’s wife, who was being cared for in the most self-sacrificing way by her husband’s brother.  It showed a spirited and original trait in Minna’s character that she decided to visit Rockel in his prison at Waldheim, solely that she might give his wife news of him, although she disliked the man intensely.

She told me of this visit, saying sarcastically that Rockel looked quite happy and bright, and that life in prison did not seem to suit him badly.

Meanwhile I plunged with renewed zeal into my work, and had finished a fair copy of the Rheingold score by the 26th of September.  In the peaceful quietness of my house at this time I first came across a book which was destined to be of great importance to me.  This was Arthur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.  Herwegh recommended this work to me, and told me that strangely enough it had only been recently discovered, although it had been published over thirty years.  In a pamphlet on this subject a certain Herr Frauenstadt had drawn the attention of the public to the book, to which I immediately felt attracted, and I at once began to study it.  For a long time I had wanted to understand the real value of philosophy.  My conversations with Lehrs in Paris in my very young days had awakened my longing for this branch of knowledge, upon which