Tuesday, July 23:
A heavy night, and I find it all but impossible to reply to R.'s cheerful morning greeting, I feel like hiding timidly away, alas, to be so unworthy of him! I part from him in tears, and only the thought that this welling remorse, which disturbs his tranquillity, is also an evil luxury, makes me take a grip on myself.
I work with the children; we receive our good Frau Jager, and in the afternoon R. reads me his splendid concluding article. A nice letter from the Knights of the Grail gives him pleasure, and we drive with the children to the Buergerreuth; first of all we visit the theater and take great delight in it. R. regards the furniture with amusement. "My God, these chairs, these mirrors! And nobody actually owns them." I: "Yes, it is probably the only property without an owner."
Then, however, a sad look back on the performances; very emphatically he exclaims: "I should not like to go through all that again! It was all wrong! ... All the activity kept me going and allowed me to overlook the bad things at the time, but I should not like to go through it again." All the same, we are glad that the theater is there; beneath the trees it looks like an eternal sunset, and it pleases us in its simple polychromy.
A lovely warm evening, R.'s kindness and merriness always shining forth anew, oh, if only I had the strength and the worthiness to erect for him the monument he deserves, the glory of Beatrice as woven by Dante would melt into nothingness! He has raised his own eternal monument in the memory of mankind; what I should like to do is to ensure that through me my children will come to know him, so that, when we are no more, they will love him like a god. Oh, if only I might succeed in this, that they may become good people, noble and pure, honoring him, proud in his memory, superior beings because of the strength of their love for him!
When Frau J. told us that they had read the whole of Faust in order, R. said, connecting her remark with Gounod's Faust, "To start with you said to yourself 'tiens, rien,' then 'tiens, tiens'!"