He had no real intention of returning to Paris. Earlier in the same letter he speaks of ending the speculating by his proposed _Jesus of Nazareth_. Indeed, the slavery of working for the market in Paris was even more repugnant to him than the liveried bondage in Saxony. Previous to the writing of this letter Liszt had lent him twelve pounds, and by the end of July he was back in Zurich, and though, much against his will, he did go to Paris again, and, in fact, much farther, Zurich was thenceforth for some years his headquarters. His host at first was an honest musician Alexander Müller, who, I believe, had known him in Würzburg long before; but he soon set up an establishment of his own.
His main purpose at this time was to try to clear in his brain the confused mass of theories and speculations concerning music, and especially opera, which had long been seething there. _Lohengrin_, the reader must have observed, was not a road leading anywhere, but an impasse; a step towards the attainment of his ideal it was not: it was, on the whole, a step backwards, although it is a much more beautiful work than _Tannhäuser_. Wagner's mind, like Thoreau's, Carlyle's, Brahms', needed filtering--an operation that could only be performed in perfect peace and loneliness. Thoreau went to Walden; Carlyle to Craigenputtock; Brahms at any rate retired from public musical life. They worked out their own salvation. Wagner felt he must do the same; as we know, he did the same: hence many of those terrible volumes of prose-writings. His mental condition is indicated in another few sentences from the letter quoted above--
"Yet I must frankly confess that the freedom which I here inhale in fresh Alpine draughts is intensely pleasing to me. What is the ordinary care about the so-called future of citizen life compared with the feeling that we are not tyrannized over in our noblest aims? How few men care more for themselves than for their stomachs? Now I have made my choice, and am spared the trouble of choosing; so I feel free in my innermost soul, and can despise what torments me from without; no one can withdraw himself from the evil influences of the civilized barbarism of our time, but all can so manage that they do not rule over our better self."