Saturday, February 8:
Snow flurries! The weather throws us this way and that. More and more I get the feeling that R. and I have been banished from the world. “Can you say where our home is?” R. has invited the copyists, along with Herr Runckwitz; nice, good people. The building supervisor tells us about the harshness of the foremen, who have been declaring in all the taverns that they intend to sue the management committee unless they are paid. The sum involved is now only 5,000 florins, and R. and I decide to pay them from my small savings if the King deserts us again.
They are preparing Rienzi in Venice and send a telegram asking whether Orsini is a “Baryton absolu,” to which R. replies that he has no knowledge of either a relative or an absolute baritone and that in Germany singers count it an honor to appear in his works. R. tells me about a dream in which he attended a performance of Der fliegende Holländer with me, and in the third act, after the Dutchman's declaration of jealousy, the scene suddenly changed back to the spinning room, in which there were three policemen; in despair R. had cried out, “Heavens, what are they doing with my things?”
In the evening Gibbon (Chrysostom) and a play sent by the secretary of the University of Strasbourg, Dr. Schricker; based, so the author assures us, on impressions received from Lohengrin, Die Meistersinger, etc., the play, Bertha the Spinner, is the most pitiful hotchpotch one can possibly imagine!
R. reads me a sentence from his State and Religion about the duties of a politician, and says: “Bismarck could quote that against me, though in any case, if he does do something for my undertaking, he will not be acting like a politician. In the whole of history only one man, Pericles, has ever found a nation which supported his ideals.”
Another sad piece of behavior from Daniella, some derogatory words about the copyists, has wounded me deeply. I have an image of the heart as a block of granite which has been broken up, and now its original pattern is being pieced together like a mosaic. One still recognizes it, but it is in pieces. However, the skeleton stays firm, and in me there arose a complaint against this physical strength which persists unimpaired though the heart is already in pieces. Fervently I longed for death, for one of the main tasks of my life I shall be unable to achieve.
Reflected on the Chandala maiden!