Friday, August 30:
R. decrees breakfast in front of the chicken house! The birds are enthroned, children, guests, and we spend a happy morning of celebration in mild weather.
When the “two geniuses” have left us, I stroll through the garden with Malwida, and she goes into raptures about R., saying she has at last seen an example of an incomparable old age. She tells me it is I who created this happiness, without me there would have been no festival, no Bayreuth; I listen to her with a thankful heart and remind her of my life’s transgression, which enabled me to live for him alone and in him to find my salvation, and that it was from this all the blessings have sprung.
Comparison between my father and R.’s essence and being. Concern over Fidi; he looks pale and, as R. says, “peaky.” In the evening a game of whist, this time with Malwida, after my father has played us several of Chopin’s preludes, which please R. very much.
Added in margin here but perhaps referring to the following day: “In the evening R. spoke with great antipathy about Rome, saying all the monuments there bore witness to infamous and enslaved human beings, from the Roman emperors to the Jesuit churches and cardinals’ palaces. Different in Florence, Genoa, Venice.” In the afternoon we were with the Wolzogens, my father played his Dante Symphony to them.