Wagner did not wish to be kapellmeister--on the contrary, wished most vigorously not to be kapellmeister. What on earth he did wish to be, how he hoped to earn bread--he who had had only one opera produced, and gained £45 by it: it is idle to speculate concerning such questions. Excepting that he laboured incessantly at his operas--scheming and sketching, if not actually composing and writing--he would seem at this stage of his growth to have been a Mr. Micawber, whose contemporary, of course, he was. He flirted with von Lüttichau, the intendant of the theatre, a fine specimen of a court barbarian. Wagner neither would nor wouldn't; and it was only when the theatre found it could not well do without him, and asked him to say definitely if he would, that he accepted the offer. We can imagine how poor, stupid, unimaginative Minna would rejoice at the news. She ought to have married a pork butcher, or would have behaved admirably as the mistress of a beerhouse or café; but as the wife of a man of genius--! To be the wife of the kapellmeister of one of Germany's principal opera-houses--a court opera-house--that was almost, if not quite, as good; and for the time she rested content with her lot. And we may believe that Richard, too, felt a double gratification, even against his deepest and truest instincts. The salary lifted a burden off his shoulders for a while; and was he not appointed to the very post his idol Weber had occupied? Nevertheless, things soon came to pass which show how the Richard who set off from Pillau to Paris with his bare travelling expenses, and the Richard who was to do yet madder things hereafter, was the Richard of this middle period. This von Lüttichau said it was the rule of the court that a new conductor should serve a year on trial. Wagner was quite brutally reminded that the mighty Weber had been compelled to do so; and he was told _he_ must do so. He point-blank refused; sent the Lüttichau man a long explanation--which, I dare say, was never read--of why he couldn't accept such terms; spoke of the necessity of getting some sort of order and discipline into an orchestra which Reissiger had allowed to go to pieces, etc., etc. But he had to his credit, as we have seen, the triumphs of _Rienzi_ and the _Dutchman_; and it shows how much he was wanted that Lüttichau yielded; he waived the twelve months' probation without murmuring--a thing almost unheard of in the case of a German official, a German court official. So on the 2nd of February, 1843, he was sworn in "for life" as co-conductor with Reissiger; and promptly learnt that he had to wear a livery like others condemned to penal servitude for life. This was the least of his troubles.