Sunday, August 25:
Lovely, bright day. R. comes to me in the morning with his good wishes; we think about our wedding day; we do not speak of it to the children, but just celebrate the King’s birthday.
With the children for a walk in the morning, to the victory tower, while they make “voyages of discovery.” Read Fortunatus to Lulu. Family lunch, drank the King’s health.
We celebrate our day by spending it together, R. and I; he reads me what he has written in his essay and then we walk with the children to the bench by the playground and dream together; then to the Schweizerei and the Wolfsschlucht, where R. leaves me at about 6:30 in case somebody is waiting in the house. I remain behind, and, as the sun goes down and the fir trees glow in its rays, I think gratefully of my good fortune. What might have become of me? Despised, robbed of my children, not married to R., I should have had to hide away. Now I am permitted to stay at his side as his wife and to live for my children. Indescribable feelings of gratitude, and blessings on Hans, who made it all possible.
Home at about 8 o’clock, R. says I am a wood nymph. Letter from Marie M., who relates that Herr von Perfall has approached Hans with a view toward reconciling him with R.!! Our astonishment makes us laugh; probably he wants with this maneuver to keep Hans, whom he hates, at a distance, just as he engaged Levi for the same purpose.
R. reads me the prologue to Faust, in connection with what he has said in his essay about the significance of Faust. He enjoyed our nice day and said, “Everything we are, all our joys, it all comes from the light; we are nothing without that.”
Yesterday, when I watched R. vanish out of sight behind the bushes in the woods, all my feelings for him came over me in a rush, and my soul hastened after him, while my body stayed fixed to the ground.
We have to laugh heartily at scenes in Geibel’s Brünnhilde, which R. is now reading, typical of the academician and classicist, who, despising all side issues, has taken just the heroine by herself, in order to create a play like Medea, Sappho, Phèdre, etc.; while Hebbel is a romantic. But both so flat and pitiful that one is amazed, not about them, but about the people who tolerate and even praise their work.
We talk about vital relationships, and R. ends by saying, “You are the only person who has given me anything, to whom I have listened willingly and attentively; you and Uncle Adolph; otherwise nobody has brought me a thing.”