Jessie Laussot was a young Englishwoman who had married a wine merchant,--Eugène Laussot--of Bordeaux, in which town the pair lived with Jessie's mother, Mrs. Taylor, the widow of an English lawyer. Jessie was introduced to Wagner in Dresden, by Karl Ritter, in 1848. Wagner's first account of the meeting is rather vague, but vague in that peculiar way that suggests to the careful student of him that he is deliberately saying less than he might. The young girl had shyly expressed her admiration for him "in a way," he says, "I had never experienced before." "It was with a strange, and, in its way, quite a new sensation," he goes on to say, "that I parted from this young friend; for the first time since my meeting with Alwine Frommann and Werder, in the _Flying Dutchman_ days, I experienced again that sympathetic tone that came as it were out of an old familiar past, but never reached me from my immediate surroundings."[81] Knowing his susceptibility to feminine sympathy, we may probably assume that Madame Laussot counted for slightly more to him just then than he cared to put into words some twenty years later.
In Zürich, whither he fled after the political troubles of 1849, he received a letter from her in which she "assured him of her continued sympathy in kind and affecting terms."[82] (She was a friend, by the way, of Frau Julie Ritter, who gave Wagner as liberal financial assistance as she could, both now and later.) Early in 1850 he goes to Paris with the half hope of getting an opera produced there. He is very depressed, and has a longing to escape to the East where, he says, "I could live out my life in some sort of humanly-worthy fashion, without any concern with this modern world."[83] While in this mood he receives an invitation from Madame Laussot to spend a little time in her house. He accepts, and goes to Bordeaux on the 16th March, where he is received "in a very friendly and flattering manner." He learns that the Ritters have been corresponding about him with the Laussots, and that there is a scheme on foot under which Mrs. Taylor, who is well-to-do, is to join with Frau Ritter in settling three thousand francs a year upon him.[84] In the explanations that ensue from his side, he divines that Jessie is the only one who thoroughly understands him. An _entente_ is established between them.[85] "I soon discovered," he says, "the gulf which separated myself, as well as her, from her mother and her husband. While that handsome young man was attending to his business for the greater part of the day, and the mother's deafness generally excluded her from most of our conversations, our animated exchange of ideas upon many important matters soon led to great confidence between us."[86] She was evidently intelligent and cultivated, a good musician and an accomplished pianist. He read her his poem of _Siegfrieds Tod_ and his sketch of _Wieland der Schmied_, and they discussed these and other topics connected with his art. "It was inevitable," he goes on to say with the crude frankness into which he sometimes falls in _Mein Leben_,[87] "that we should soon feel the people around us irksome to us in our conversations."