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Very weary, I followed him to a nasty and badly lighted house, where I gulped down the wine with hasty ill-humour to warm myself, and listened to the embarrassed conversation of my good-natured friend and his companion, whilst I turned over the day's papers. I now had ample leisure to read the criticisms they contained on the first performance of my Fliegender Hollander.

Getting paper and ink, he did as I desired, and we parted. I flung myself unconsciously on the bed for a deep and invigorating sleep. Next morning I was fresh and well. I paid a farewell call on Schroeder-Devrient, who promised me to do all she could for the Fliegender Hollander as soon as possible, drew my fee of a hundred ducats, and set off for home.

I therefore realised beforehand that my Fliegender Hollander was to be relegated to the category of conductor's operas, and would meet with the usual predestined fate of such productions.

Meanwhile I had renewed my acquaintance with the friend I had won through the production of the Fliegender Hollander in Berlin, and who for a long time I had never had an opportunity of knowing more thoroughly. The second time I met her was at Schroder- Devrient's, with whom she was already on friendly terms, and of whom she used to speak as 'one of my greatest conquests.

I knew of him only in connection with a scathing criticism of my Fliegender Hollander.

This episode, like so much else that I saw during these few days, gave me abundant food for thought and meditation. A second excursion, also undertaken with Devrient, took me in the December of that year to Berlin, where the singer had been invited to appear at a grand state concert. I for my part wanted an interview with Director Kustner about the Fliegender Hollander.

She was pale and distraught, ate hardly anything, and her faculties were subjected to a strain so extraordinary that I thought she would not escape a serious, perhaps a fatal illness. Sleep had long since deserted her, and whenever I brought her my unlucky Fliegender Hollander, her looks so alarmed me that the proposed rehearsal was the last thing I thought of.

Here I worked every morning at the translation of my Fliegender Hollander, and also composed two musical album pieces, one of which, intended for Princess Metternich, contained a pretty theme which had long floated in my mind, and was afterwards published, while a similar one, for Frau Pourtales, got somehow mislaid.

A great contrast to this visit was one I received from a peculiar man called C. Gaillard. He was the editor of a Berlin musical paper, which had only just started, and in which I had read with great astonishment an entirely favourable and important criticism of my Fliegender Hollander.

Besides this I occasionally dined with the Flaxland family, who still refused to despair of my eventual success with the Parisians. For the present my Paris publisher continued to issue the Fliegender Hollander as well as Rienzi, for which he paid me tifleen hundred francs as a small fee, which I had not bargained for on the first edition.