Cosima WAGNER (1837-1930) daughter of Liszt and Marie d'Agoult, wife of Richard Wagner: L.A.S. "your little Why", [Berlin mid-November 1858], to "dear mimi" [Marie d'AGOULT]; 6 pages in-8. Long letter to her mother. She speaks first of various works she has commissioned, including Paul HEYSE's Sabines, which she will perhaps translate. She is immersed "in the quiet and fortifying waters" of the English theologian Theodore PARKER, "the Unitarian, who from the pulpit calmly says that the mystery of the Trinity, the miraculous birth of the Messiah are absurdities, that science is to the mind what temperance is to the body, that it gives him beauty, strength and health, that institutions must be dependent on man and never man, dependent on these institutions, and who names at the same time Jesus Christ, Buddha, Mohammed Plato and Zoroaster! His sermon on the search for truth is the most beautiful, in my opinion, he maintains that every progress made in science is one of the steps of our pilgrimage towards God, and that every philosopher or mathematician, even if he denied the supreme being, did it only to protest against the false God he was ordered to worship, and that he recognized the true creator in spite of himself by his acts and discoveries"... Then she evokes the "family visit" of Queen Victoria to Berlin, the next elections, and the nomination to the direction of the Cults of Bethmann-Hollweg, "very enlightened and very tolerant man", of Charles Dollfus. She only comes to "Madame Mélusine who stole several nights from me, like the ugly fairy that she is. First of all, Tieck and Schwab are rude Germans, who can think of nothing better than to tell you about the marriage of the syrene, and then the consecutive births of 10 children, whose lives and adventures they detail, to end in two lines, and to say quite bluntly that one Saturday Raymond discovered Melusine in her bath, that she learned about it, and that she separated from him for ever. You can imagine my anger when reading these stories, of which only the description of the wedding in the enchanted forest is to be taken, because it is done with a lot of imaginative charm, and a great poetry of details ". She then recounts three adventures of Mélusine that she has imagined. Then she comes to the Faust of GOETHE, and to the book of Dinger indicating " all the sources from which the great poet drew ". Her husband, Hans von BULOW, " the little tiger-cat ", has just " composed a cadenza for B[eethoven's] concerto in G which I find very ingenious and beautiful ". She adds that Wagner is in Venice: " His Rienzi has made a furor in Dresden ".