Friday, August 30:
R. had a very bad night: “What I call being healthy is being able to follow one’s inclinations, and my inclination is toward productivity; now, alas, I have to spend my mornings running around instead of sitting still and working.”
When I tell him how happy his letter to my father has made me and how much I love him, he says, “But I you much more, and you are more beautiful and more complete than I am”!!
When we speak of that woman, Mathilde Wesendonck, who, in spite of her long contact with him, absorbed his ideas so little that she could now write literary dramas, R. says, “Associations of that sort were a constant stirring of the pot on my part; what was in the pot can only be judged once the stirring has ceased and the grounds have settled.”
Fine letter from the King, he applies King Marke’s words to the Nibelungen (“this wonderful work, which my desire,” etc.), and R. finds this extraordinarily witty.
R. works; went into town in the afternoon, did some shopping in case my father summons us; also bought things for Fidi.
In the morning Fidi makes us laugh heartily. We had forbidden him to put his feet on the table; now he placed them there and hit them, said, “Feet, go away!,” and threatened them with a stick, holding it above his head and watching us slyly.
Letter from Malwida, at the same time one from Herwegh. On behalf of the Herzen children, the former had asked Herwegh for the letters their mother had written to him; she received from him a rude refusal, and, since Malwida had told him she was applying to him with R.’s consent, H. also writes here. “He is dripping with importance now,” R. says. The pitiful creatures!
In the evening R. does some revision.