Thursday, May 23:
R. dreams of a room which he is obliged to enter and on which is written Met on park français, then of Betz and Niemann, with whom he had quarreled.
Up early and into town, R. to the patrons' meeting, which decides unanimously to build the theater; I with Frl. von Schorn from Weimar and Elisabeth Krockow, beforehand tried to appease Frau Niemann. To Frl. von Sch[orn], who invites me to go to Weimar, I say that I shall do this only along with Wagner, either a complete reunion, or none at all.
Breakfast with Marie Schl.; visit to the festival site, then farewell to many friends; in the evening, however, still a great many of them with us, among them the splendid Mme Lucca from Milan, of whom R. says Nature originally intended to make a man, until it realized that in Italy the men were not much use, and quickly corrected itself.
R. very tired in the evening, but cheerful. The weather fine today; we persuade ourselves that with yesterday's wretched weather we had paid our debt to Fate and, because of that, worse things had been spared us. But the nicest thing was that this misfortune had not been able to spoil our mood.
A curious scene took place yesterday at the banquet; Herr Gumprecht and Herr Engel got into an argument with Herr Coerper from Berlin, the latter probably feeling their presence there to be unseemly. A Bavarian army captain, Herr von Baligand, intervened and said merely that the journalists should be thrown out if they behaved badly, and this was done, whereupon the entire Jewish contingent from Berlin stood up as one man to defend the gentlemen of the press, and forced Coerper to apologize.
This last act, when we heard of it, made R. and me extremely indignant. The unseemliness of journalists' being present is accepted without murmur, the impropriety of one incensed person on the other hand is punished; out of fear of the press, that is the truth of the matter.
Besides this, so we hear, many cases of wounded vanity, but nothing can cloud the picture we keep in our hearts. News of Clemens's engagement.