For her husband and mother-in-law she left letters--it would seem that there must have been little else to leave--explaining that she would never return. At the same time she instituted divorce proceedings, and announced that she was asking the Church to grant her freedom. Being a Catholic, it was necessary for her to persuade the Pope himself to permit her to wed Liszt. In the meanwhile, her husband went to the Czar and loudly bewailed the loss of his daughter and all his money. The old story--"My daughter! Oh, my ducats! Oh, my daughter! Oh, my Christian ducats! Justice! the law! My ducats and my daughter!" The princess fled across the Russian border, just at the time of the Revolution of 1848. At the Austrian boundary Liszt's faithful valet met her; in Ratibor she found Liszt's friend, the Prince Lichnovski, who some months after fell a martyr to the revolution. He conducted her to Liszt. A few days later they visited the prince for two weeks at one of his castles. The troubles of the revolution and the barricaded streets drove them from the country to Weimar, where Liszt had been given the post of Kapellmeister. It was this third-rate town that became the birthplace of a new school of German opera, for years the hub of the musical universe. Here in Weimar the princess lived thirteen years. She placed herself under the protection of the Grand Duchess of Weimar, Maria Polovna, the sister of the Czar and a friend of her childhood. She chose the Altenburg château for her home. A year later, Liszt, who had found a neighbouring hotel too remote, took up his home in one of the wings of the château. Here he spent the most profitable years of his artistic life. His twelve Symphonic Poems, his Faust and Dante Symphonies, his Hungarian Rhapsodies, and many other important works, including also literary compositions, he achieved here. The irritation he had felt at the superficial meddling, and domineering criticism of his would-be Muse, the Comtesse d'Agoult, was changed to such a communion as the old Roman king Numa enjoyed with his inspiring nymph, Egeria. During the princess' stay in Weimar, constant pressure was brought upon her to return to Russia to arrange a settlement of affairs. She feared returning to that great prison-land, which cannot be easily entered or left, lest they should forbid her return to Liszt. Even threats to declare her an exile and confiscate her goods, would not move her. Eventually the property she had inherited from her father was put in her daughter's name, by the Czar's order--an arrangement Liszt had long pleaded for in vain. The husband's feelings were mollified by the appropriation to him of the seventh part of her property, and the arrangement of a guardianship for the daughter.