Thursday, December 26:
Let the children come to my bedside; all of them look well, and Fidi lightens R.’s most despondent hours with his brightness, and his goodness. “He will accomplish much more than I,” R. says, “but one thing I can tell him: he will never have a wife like mine.” Fidi took his boy to bed with him, and when in the morning the bed was wet, he declared, “It wasn’t I; the boy made it wet.”
All kinds of things arrive: from my mother, Guizot’s Histoire de France racontée à mes petits-enfants; Havet’s Le Christianisme et ses origines; new insights into the French character. R. says they arouse in him downright disgust. Marie Much sends a Rheingold paperweight, and various other things come from various quarters.
Unfortunately R. is not well, he is listless and has a cold; he goes out for a short while. The weather is fine, I write to my mother and have troubles with the “watchman.”
In the evening there is a great pile of books, and we glance through all sorts of things: J. Grimm’s introduction to his grammar, Mone’s preface to his collection of German plays, and two scenes from Pfaffe Lamprecht’s Alexander, the rest in the forest and the conversation with King Occidatis; both splendid, the latter very remarkable.
On Alexander’s reply, “This being has been chosen for us by him who has the highest power. What he has assigned to us, that we must all carry out,” I have to think of R., who will now also have to continue without rest to the end.
“These Nibelungen performances,” R. says to me, “will be my Seven Years’ War, after which I shall be very old.” Of the French book R. says: “How can one talk about religion? It must exist, one must feel it, one cannot get through to it with proofs and investigations.”