Saturday, November 30:
R. had a good night. He goes off to work and comes at lunchtime to fetch me. After lunch he says: "I can prove mathematically that I am the happiest man on earth! It is hard to sustain my pessimism - you have turned me into an optimist." The reasons for his pessimism are soon discovered. "I have not yet struggled quite free, magic still guides my footsteps," R. says, recalling his connections with Munich. "If only the King would get rid of people like Perfall!"
When I tell him he is the only person I know who is capable of happiness, since he has no vain desires, he says, "Yes, but it is precisely this capacity that all my friends denied me; and what an unfair judgment it was, after the sad and pitiful life I had been leading!" He recalls my mother and her remark when Minna, in her anxiety to please, spoke ironically about the pile of cushions on his sofa in Zurich: "Pas si de trop" ["Not one too many"]. "I was pleased by that," he says, "and I thought to myself, 'I must get hold of this woman's daughter'!" Then we speak of my father, who cannot feel at home here with us, though he ought to be glad of our happiness.
Dancing lesson for me, R. goes for a walk, then does some work. In the evening we begin Walter Scott's Life of Napoleon; R. quotes Heine's criticism of it and talks about the discredit into which it subsequently fell. But he says he himself finds it as interesting as a criminal case. R. is pleased by the sublime and mysterious fact that he has not had to rearrange or alter a single word in Parsifal, melody and words fit throughout - what he wrote down in the prelude contains all he needs, and it all unfolds like a flower from its bud. When he tells me this, I say nobody would ever believe that the melody in Die Meistersinger was invented, not for the words "scheint mir nicht der Rechte," but at first for the Overture. "Yes," he says, "that Overture was one of my most remarkable inspirations."