Wednesday, January 8:
“Fourteen days ago there was humming going on downstairs, but you didn’t notice,” says R., after telling me that he slept well. We have a lot more fun about the dress he ordered yesterday, and he says, raising a clenched fist, that he is “horribly” annoyed with himself for not having ordered one which particularly pleased him last year! He works: “Exactly ten bars today,” he tells me when he fetches me for lunch.
He has received news of the death of the stout-hearted Herr Müller, and he recalls his friendly judgment on me back in 1857: “She is a real thoroughbred” - he (R.) had been so pleased by this, and also by his delight when he saw us come together. “That must have been a real weight off the minds of all my friends who knew about my disgraceful life. What they all had to put up with from me! Something like an avalanche lies between my former life and my present life.”
He looks at the photograph of Semper which friend Lenbach has sent me, the exact image of an old lazzarone. “That’s how I shall look one day,” he says. I: “Oh!” He: “No, I believe I shall always look well, for I grow happier every day.”
I tell him I have been reading his Stabat Mater and enjoyed it very much, whereupon he: “Yes, after having spent two years in Paris! And after only one I was completely finished with it all. I wrote that article in my little room, when I had stopped going out, and saw and heard nothing - from that point of view these things are not uninteresting.”
We then return to the subject of Semper, whose genius had so astounded me at our first meeting in Zurich. R. asks whether I would have married him. I: “Before Hans, yes; after Hans, no.” It would have been a bad match, R. observes. We then recall Semper’s assertion that it did not matter at all to him for whom or for what he did his work, also his antipathy toward Christianity. R. says, “For the plastic artist things can only come from the outside world, and Christianity can’t produce any buildings.”
It is very cold, but R. goes out both morning and afternoon, and it does him good. When I return home, I find him walking up and down in the salon, so cheerful and content that my heart laughs to see him. “Things are going so well for me,” he says! We celebrate the octave of my birthday, I in white, as on every Wednesday now, and we remain alone together.
Hans’s birthday brings our thoughts back to the past; we recall Jan. 8, 1868, in Munich, R.’s moving speech at the little celebration; it is all so sad; in the morning R. had thought of my father’s visit to him at Tribschen, during which my father was filled with deep pity for his loneliness but could do no more than point as consolation to the portrait of the King!
R. says: “Nobody believes in real love - even Hans thought I was just amusing myself. The fact that I had often been prepared to accept money made them all contemptuous of me. I knew what my feelings were when I accepted it, but for them it was a matter of pride not to accept anything from anybody.”
A letter from E[lisabeth] Nietzsche brings back to us our experiences with her brother. The news that he, N., wants Parsifal to be staged makes R. smile bitterly: “Now they think I have no other wish but to stage another such performance” - whereas all that concerns him is how he can avoid it. I: “It is only necessary not to wish it.” R., with a sigh: “Oh, one would like it to happen, and yet one doesn’t want to do it” - that is our sadly conflicting position.
But all these reflections melt into joy, today as on all other days, in the knowledge that we found each other in this terrible existence!