While Wagner was living on terms of strange intimacy with the young king, he was accused of Oriental luxury. The selection of the rainbow furnishings of his house and of his own dressing-gowns, which made Joseph's coat mere negligée, was not altogether his own, but showed the unmistakable guiding hand of a woman. Frau Cosima von Bülow acted as a sort of secretary to Wagner. She was the daughter of Liszt; her mother was the Comtesse d'Agoult, who wrote under the name of "Daniel Stern," and with whom Liszt had lived for a few years. Cosima had married Hans von Bülow in 1857. Von Bülow had in his earlier years been greatly befriended by Liszt and by Wagner. In 1850, when Von Bülow was about twenty years old, Wagner and Liszt both had written to his mother, who was then divorced, begging her to let her son take up music. Like Schumann's mother, she opposed music as a career, but Von Bülow persisted, and became Liszt's pupil. Wagner was to Von Bülow a god. It was a pitiful practical joke that Fate should have directed the god's favour toward the worshipper's wife. But those ugly old maids, the Fates, have never had a sense of good form. As early as 1864 Wagner had written to Frau Wille, complaining of Von Bülow's misfortunes, and saying: "Add to this a tragic marriage; a young woman of extraordinary, quite unprecedented endowment, Liszt's wonderful image, but of superior intellect." Wagner persuaded the king to make Von Bülow court pianist, and later court conductor. There are very pretty accounts of the musical at-homes of the Von Bülows and Wagner. Then Wagner's popularity with the king eventually raised such hostility that, at the king's request, he left the country to save his life. He was again an exile. Cosima, with her two children, went with him, and later Von Bülow came, but he soon had to go to Basle to earn his living as a piano teacher, and left his family at Lucerne. There exists a letter from Wagner's cook, telling a friend of how the king came incognito to visit Wagner, and how the house was upset by the descent of Cosima and her children. They had come to stay. At Triebschen, near Lucerne, Wagner lived with the Von Bülow family, and began to know contentment. The relations of Wagner and Cosima rapidly grew intimate enough to torment even the idolatrous Von Bülow. Riemann says: "Domestic misunderstandings led, in 1869, to a separation, and Von Bülow left the city." One of the "domestic misunderstandings" was doubtless the birth of Siegfried Wagner, June 6, 1869. A speedy divorce and marriage were imperative. The chief difficulty in the securing of the much desired divorce was that Cosima must change her religion, or her "religious profession," to use the more accurate phrase of Mr. Finck, who says that Wagner in his life with her, had "followed the example of Liszt and Goethe and other European men of genius, an example the ethics of which this is not the place to discuss."