Monday, June 24:
Midsummer’s Day! R. works, but has trouble with his paper, which has become damp and smudges the notes. It makes him think laughingly of Laube and his decorations, which shrank. He has written to H. Forges, because he is pleased with his article on the performance of the 9th, and, as he says: “I can never forget it when someone has behaved well toward me. He arranged the concert in Prague very well for me, and in the evil days in Vienna he was the only one to whom I could turn, so he can go on sinning for quite a while before I strike him off my good books.”
At lunch we talked about French legends, including Bluebeard. R. says, “I cannot understand why a present-day French dramatist has not made something out of this in the way E. Sue tells it: Bluebeard setting out mockingly to expose Joan of Arc, being overwhelmed by her rawness and her purity; he serves her penitently and loyally and is the only one who makes an attempt to free her; when he sees her on the stake, he is overcome by despair and returns to his former transgressions. I know that if I were a young French writer I should immediately, as always, have seen my three acts in this and put them into shape for the Porte St. Martin or the Ambigu; and it would have been highly effective. But that’s the way of these unhappy mortals, they ask the public what it wants, just as Gerardy once told me that the ‘Marseillaise’ had gone out of fashion under Louis-Philippe. And nobody dares create fashion for himself.”
We spoke of his first marriage. “My God,” says R., “it was no extravagant urge which drove me to it, but a truly respectable one, and it is true that this marriage kept me from all unsettling relationships and helped to develop my artistic side. I reached the age of 40 without even believing in a more serious relationship with a woman, as for example mine with Jessie Laussot. While the powers of your father’s soul were stirred from his earliest days by such relationships, mine stayed firmly fixed on my artistic development!” “Certainly,” he says, laughing, “I had to pay rather dearly for this conservation.”
R. plays me what he wrote today, the beginning of Siegfried’s narration. Then he goes for a walk, I stay with the children. Letter to Ernst Dohm, inquiry concerning the Academic Society in Berlin.