It is really time I told you again how much I love you! I am taking my best writing-paper so as to make this declaration of love as impressive to you as possible. I have let myself in for severe chastisement through these present productions of my operas. I am indeed doing penance for having been untrue to myself and having agreed to allow them. An additional torment is that from time to time the hope of big profits is aroused in me, and this, for I am like that, leads me on to extravagance; then all of a sudden the whole thing shrinks to a matter of a few miserable pence and ha'pence. Well, these are vain plaints which a respectable man ought not to make. But I must just tell you how I live here now. Like a regular oddity. For some time I have had a mania for luxury. Anyone who is capable of realising for what it has to make up to me will hardly be displeased with me. In the mornings I sit down in the midst of this luxury and work. That is what I need most of all and a morning without work is a day in hell to me. By work, however, I do not mean reading, a thing I can hardly do at all now, it is so repellent to me, but composition. I usually sit too long over this and rouse the just ire of my wife by getting ready for dinner too late, so it is in the most amiable mood in the world that I enter upon the second half of my day, with not the least idea what to do with it. Lonely walks in the fog; many evenings to the Wesendoncks. Tell Emilie that it is there I still get my only inspiration; that charming lady remains faithful and devoted to me, though there is much that is necessarily painful to me in this acquaintance. The most interesting hour of the day is still that which brings the postman, so I am still almost wholly dependent on what comes from without. The day before yesterday I nearly wrote to the King of Saxony to grant me an amnesty. Naturally the mood did not last long and then I wanted to go straight to Germany and let myself be imprisoned if necessary. Now I let the fate of God's sending have its way with me again and shall soon return to music-making.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 254