Friday, December 6:
Fidi ill for the past three days! R. again had no sleep, he got up during the night and read three chapters of the Turgenev book, in which one passage made him laugh out loud; he reads to me this very funny scene, in which the athletic diacre, wishing to say something friendly, makes such a loud noise that everyone is startled.
I implore R. not to work, and he promises me not to. He looks worn out, and only the fact that he has not lost his appetite gives me some comfort; but he does not sleep, in the afternoon, either, “in spite of the Tagblatt.”
Over coffee he comes back to Bismarck’s judgment on Wilhelm Tell: “As if the intention were to depict a hero!” And then he goes on, in his inimitable way, about the folk instinct which finds expression in this figure, who steels himself to the terrible deed, placing his faith in God, yet at the same time resolving on murder in a dark, unconscious way, not like a hero, hand on heart, but like a prowling wild beast which has to be destroyed. When R. says these splendid things, I observe that he should mention them in his next article, since the people themselves are just as little understood as Tell. R. replies, “I have already made a note of it.”
He stays indoors and reads Virgin Soil, which he finds interesting.
But again he did not rest in the afternoon, and he looks nervous. How difficult to control one’s worry, how inefficient I am becoming in everything! I have to ask W. to answer a letter for me!
In the evening I read some more Busch to R., and in the end he decides that the language of our greatest man is very vulgar, like tavern talk!