Wednesday, June 16:
Feeling very worn out after a difficult night, I cannot yet bear much. Vreneli gives me a great shock by telling me of a letter from the maidservant in Munich, wanting urgently to know Hermine's present whereabouts. I imagined all sorts of terrible things and tried to get a grip on myself by assuming all these terrible things had already happened.
R. came; before entering my room he put something to rights in the salon, causing me to remark jokingly that he must always fiddle about with things. The joke came near to upsetting him, and I made it only because the one single difference between R. and myself is that he takes pleasure in comfort and in pretty things, while I tend almost to prefer doing without to enjoying. I often think that one day I shall have to suffer complete deprivation in order to prove the value of this trait, which now sometimes causes trouble.
Siegfried was brought in to us; how carefully I shall bring him up! Of course everything is ordained in the stars, and he is already what he will later become, yet his development can still be benefited by his upbringing. Whether he will grow into a rugged oak or a lean poplar, that is already laid down; but whether the tree will remain beautiful, will not be damaged by parasite growths or plagued by maggots, that is what care, upbringing, is for. I shall be the loyal gardener who understands and protects you, my little boy, my good boy. R. declares he will be a genius because he is my son, but all he himself wishes for is a man.
Since I feel very weak I stay in bed. R. plays through the whole of his third act. How lovely that we now have this! R. is sad to see me looking so worn out, and says that I suffer too much. He says the path of conciliatory discussion I have initiated with Hans will bring me much suffering, but I was right to do it, or rather, I was Rightness itself.
Then we discussed the completion of the library for Siegfried; he intends to learn Latin again with him. For the shaping of our happiness, he says, he would have no fears were it not for the existence of the things from which we are cutting ourselves off. Once more we went through all our sufferings in Munich. We, not even we, could have acted differently!
Afterward read Eckermann-Goethe. R. went to the piano; a glance at the French songs of his youth, which he had copied out and presented to me at Christmas, filled him with great bitterness. He remembered how he was kept waiting outside the room in Mme Viardot's house and then had begged her to sing his “Attente,” which “with radiant eyes” she had refused to do. He had had too much to put up with; not a single man had he discovered. I asked him whether he had done better with women. “Yes,” he said, laughing, for he had me. Then he went to get ready for his walk.
When he came up, he was weeping; inside him, he said, was nothing but praise and glory in connection with me, melancholy and bitterness in connection with everything else. Kos's condition is again causing us much worry; the poor dog's days are certainly numbered.
R. says he would like to return to Mme Viardot her Dore edition of Don Quixote; the illustrations displease us more and more. From Cervantes's story the Frenchman has extracted nothing but caricature. R. feels that even Cornelius, for instance, would for all his awkwardness have understood it better.
The German Catholics are now firmly resisting the Council. Probably it will once more fall to the Germans to save the honor of mankind. Neither the French nor the English will bother about it; they will either simply bow to it or ignore the whole thing.
The weather is overcast, but in the evening becomes brighter. On Wednesdays the witches are said to have power over one. When it rained in the morning, I felt as if the good spirits were weeping with me. R. is giving up his intended cure in order to finish writing his third act. I feel he is right, for we have too many worries on our minds for him to be able to tend his health in peace and to good effect; and pleasure in one's work can also be beneficial.