Lot n° 103
Estimation :
1500 - 2000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 2 944EUR
Cosima WAGNER. 6 L.A.S. "Cose", "Cosima" or initials, [Berli - Lot 103
Cosima WAGNER. 6 L.A.S. "Cose", "Cosima" or initials, [Berlin (and Denmark) March-October 1863], to her half-sister Claire de Charnacé; 20 pages in-8 and 6 pages in-12 (the 1st in pencil).
On the birth of his second daughter Blandine, Richard Wagner, politics, Renan's Life of Jesus, and his mother Marie d'Agoult.
[Berlin March 23]. Pencil bill announcing that she "gave birth on the 20th to a big girl" [Blandine].
[Berlin early April]. "Thank you, my dear Claire, your letter has enlivened the solitude of my patient bed; today I am up and about but weak and exhausted I fear that a good part of my moral and physical strength has perished in the fight!" She begs Charles to get her some muslin and quilting. "I have in prospect the pleasures of a removal, and at present the pleasure of a sick nurse, and my maid in bed. I am resolved never to count trouble of this kind for anything, but the time of childbirth makes the accompaniment of this resolution somewhat difficult. Our landlord chases us away because of the music; I suspect he has read Plato and ranks us among the poets, for he sends me away with compliments on my personal charms and those of my family."...
Berlin April 29. "My darling, dress, muslin, bonnet, brassiere, headband, everything has arrived, and I only have to thank you a thousand times; this morning little Blandine unveiled her Valenciennes bonnet which suits her perfectly, she had Daniela's christening dress [...] When I say happiness, you hear me and you know what I mean by that name. My eyes are not better [...] The rest of my health is good, I do not lack strength neither to suffer nor to wait, and I have returned to my habits of silent and violent endurance. I have a nurse, which means a lot of expenses and troubles; the maid who raised Loulou has fallen ill and I will no longer have the zeal and intelligence with which she is endowed, so I have been forced to resort to a model of laziness and stupidity; that's it for nine months, that's how I console myself, all the while telling myself that in life one never ends up sending oneself from one era to the next, peace is always on the Greek calendar" .... On politics: "We talk about war here as if we wanted it, we don't know exactly how the game will be played, but we are sure that Prussia will lose and France will win. For myself, I still don't believe it, knowing too well my home, the apathy of the public, and the embarrassment of Badinguet. [...] Wagner, returning from Petersburg, stopped for two days in Berlin where he sowed the rubles, he really collected golden laurels in this Russia which, after having frightened the world with its power, is like a house of cards. On the pianist Thalberg: "it is bland and flabby". Gounod's Faust " is here a success for Jews and the beau-monde, the real public shrugs its shoulders, but money and nobility are two powers that laugh quite a bit at the scorn of intelligence "...
[Berlin June 24]. "Your printed prose [article on the portrait of Napoleon III by Hippolyte Flandrin] gave me great pleasure, by speaking of the emperor-poet, you have indicated one of the facets of this astonishing character, which have always surprised me the most. The historical fragments, the complaint "l'Exil", some passages of his speeches and his political writings, manifest a lyrical disposition, I almost said sentimental. And this is not played, it is rather repressed like the revolutionary instincts; revolt, melancholy, calculation, are three equally great forces in him, the last one is more put into play by the necessity to live, the struggle for life, which is here identical to struggle for power"... Then on German politics and Bismarck: "One must have lived in Germany to appreciate Caesarism, one must know the political mess in which one has lived up to now to savor the autocratic benefit; it is a sad thing to come to defend what one hates, but men force us to do so. My peaceful character comes to desire war, aristocracy, everything rather than the regime of the language and the purse"... His daughter Blandine ("my second troublemaker") is ill. She complains that she has not been paid for more than two years by the Revue germanique... ". I send or rather I lead Daniela every morning to the kindergarten where she likes it well enough and where she learns nothing except to live with her contemporaries, which is already a lot. She becomes original and pretty according to me, but I do not believe that her kind of beauty is an omnibus kind; she will be imperious and ardent, I believe it at least, and I find that in the narrow framework that life reserves for her she would do better to be modest and patient "...
[Klampenborg (Denmark) July]: "decidedly there is only the South; the beauties of
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