Friday, December 26:
Reality demands its rights! We reflect that there is a debt of 9,000 florins on the theater building, and that R. promised Feustel to give a concert in Vienna in order to raise them, then he would no longer bother himself about the matter. An idea comes into his mind of applying to the Emperor, requesting him to command the festival of 1875 as a German celebration of peace with France, and to allocate 100,000 thalers for it; we consider who might sign this petition.
A letter comes from Herr Hoffmann, whom Herr Feustel had referred to Herr Erlanger for his 1,500 thalers, to pay for the sketches; Herr Erlanger, like all his tribe, seeks and finds excuses. Deep shame and annoyance; Judea is always the same.
Today R. writes his official letter of thanks for the decoration to the King, from whom we get nothing but silence.
How infinitely good R. always is I saw from the answer he gave me when I remarked to him that a person like Princess Hohenlohe, who had lived through and participated in the whole process of the R.'s first conception, had now relapsed into complete silence, at the very time when she could, and was in a position to, do something. R. says it means simply that she has finished with us, she made her decision at the time she contracted her marriage, and now she was as good as dead.
At lunch R. expounds to us his view that the heroic tribes of Germany, the Franks, the Normans, and the Goths, had, in conquering, gone to ruin themselves; they had indeed created new civilizations, but only in the way that manure rejuvenates and fertilizes old soil. It was the sedentary Saxons and Alemanni who had produced German culture, with a mixture of Philistinism.
After lunch I read Prosper Merimée's Lettres à une inconnue, which Malwida gave me. Much intelligence and knowledge, gracefulness, and even humor, but all so alien that one does not know whether to censure or to acclaim it.
Daniella has received a letter from her father in Meiningen; he sends a Christmas gift and writes contentedly of his stay in England.
In the evening we take up our Father again, his remarks on translation and handling the German cones, an opera score, Lefiore by O[tto] Bach, arrived; R. played it through, and we had to laugh a lot at its plagiarisms and trivialities. The peculiar notation “energico, feroce, ma non troppo” produced from R. the witticism “tempo giusto ma non troppo!” On Wednesday our breakfast was enlivened by a statement from Eckermann; R. had opened the Conversations at random and came on this: “Brooms are always being worn out, boys are always being born,” which made us laugh heartily.
At lunch, when I declared that R. now looks younger and better than he did years ago, he says, “I once looked so blooming that I sat for a painter for a still life of fruit,” which reduces us to a state of uncontrollable laughter.