Poor dear Minna! Once more I implore you a thousand times, have patience and above all have trust. If you knew how you torture me by your lack of the latter, you would be sorry, I am sure. Briefly, when you assured me that you really did love me, I adjured you to show it to me by abandoning all arguments and accusations on that count, at least till after your cure, whereupon I promised to do everything you wished on my part to set you at rest. But the Tempter has got the better of you for the second time and this time you have openly broken love and faith with me. I forgive you, in the first place on account of your wretched state of health, which has made you almost irresponsible, and more I forgive it you for all the future.
But now I beseech you to bend all your strength of mind to believing, firmly and unswervingly, in my sincere life-long sympathy with you, in my heart-felt wish to promote your welfare, in my firm resolution to set my hopes upon no other object. If you cannot do so you will make yourself and me unhappy. I should not have needed this entreaty if you had always had the calmness of mind to judge me fairly, and especially to form a clear idea of that relationship which even now, as I perceive, continues to trouble you unnecessarily, even after you had satisfied yourself about it.
From the other side there is only one thing I could be reproached with, and that is that I ever omitted to make plain to you the purity of these relations, so that it would have been impossible for you thus to insult the lady concerned. These reproaches have been made me by the husband, the man who, ever in his wife's fullest confidence, was always able to bear himself to me with dignity and friendliness, just because he was convinced of the innocence of our relations. The only excuse I could offer him on this point was that I believed it to be impossible to convince you of anything of that kind, and, alas! despite all my assurances, that appears to be proving true.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 351