Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of July 18, 1869

Overview

Richard is tired from the previous day but works and sends Cosima completed sketches while she tends the youngest children. The Mendes couple spend the afternoon and evening with them, and Judith gives Cosima a precious Chinese-inscribed fan in exchange for a Wagner page whose personal worth makes it hard to surrender. Richard views the couple as an enrichment, though their delicate health concerns him.

Content

Sunday, July 18:

R. rose late, is tired from yesterday. But he works. The children to church. I with the youngest ones. R. sends me the sketches which he has completed.

Bathing with the little ones, then from two till ten the Mendès couple. She gives me a fan which a Chinese, an academician, has inscribed for her and which in the eyes of the Chinese is worth 100,000 francs; in exchange I have to give her a page of R.’s, which has indeed for me a different worth. I found it hard to part with it, though I do not begrudge it to this remarkable woman.

R. regards her and her husband as a real enrichment of our lives, and they are certainly an extraordinary, noble couple. Unfortunately both of them seem in delicate health.