Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 June 1883 — Wagner and Dumas. [ARTICLE]

Wagner and Dumas.

Wagner could never join in little jokes against himself. Alexandre Dumas, calling upon him once, made some good-humored remark about his own ignorance of music—which he had once defined as “the most expensive of noises”—but his pleasantries were listened to with such a smileless stolidity that he went home in a huff and wrote his contemptuous protest against “Wagnerian din—inspired by the riot of cate 'scampering in the dark about an ironmonger’shop.” On the day before this protest was printed in the Opinion Nationale, Wagner returned Dumas’s visit, and was kept waiting for half an hour inlan ante-room. Then the author of the “Trois Mousquetftires” marched in superbly attired in a plumed helmet, a cork life belt and a flowered dressing gown. “Excuse me for appearing in my working dress,” he said, majestically. Half my ideas are lodged in this helmet and the other half in a pair of jack boots which I put on to compose love scenes.” Snubs of this sort—of which Wagner encountered many—r rankled deep in his mind and made him say that the French were Vandals. When sinners have supposed themselves to be dying and professed to be converted, but afterward have unexpectedly recovered, in most cases they have lived as they did before. This is the general opinion of pastors who have seen these supposed death-bed conversions, as reported by the Christian Advocate.