Tuesday, March 31:
Stormy spring weather; remained indoors, I with the children, R. working. Yesterday, when he was being embraced by R., Fidi gave him such a violent push that it led to a nosebleed and R. almost fainted, which made Fidi feel very sorry.
Letter from Herr Tappert in Berlin: the Society for the Performance of the Nibelungen (Loeser) has frittered away 1,600 thalers, and no one knows whether it was due to stupidity or dishonesty. In the afternoon, I went with R. and all the children to the house - slow and patience-testing progress. Before that friend Feustel came; he had just seen Brandt, who does not wish to come here until the end of April, which upsets R. greatly and makes him see Brandt as a different person from the one he had first believed him to be.
It seems that Brandt has accepted other commissions and is treating our undertaking as a sideline. Friend Feustel sees things in general in a dim light, the French are thinking of nothing but war, and how wretchedly the German Parliament is behaving! We discuss this in the evening after reading the attached newspaper report.
A clipping from a Berlin newspaper reports the visit of two members of the Reichstag to Bismarck’s sickbed; Bismarck is said to have threatened to resist if he did not receive a majority vote! We cannot get over our indignation that the fact of Moltke’s being in favor was not enough - the nobodies had to put in their word, too. We read in Schlegel’s Indian Studies the story of the hermit Cantu, and after that some Indian proverbs whose profundity stimulates us immensely; for example: “I call happy the unknown person who has never crossed a rich man’s threshold, who has not experienced the pain of separation, and who has never spoken an unmanly word.”