Monday, April 28:
R. had a good rest. He is using these quiet days for correspondence; today he writes to friend Heckel and congratulates him on keeping to the spirit of the work in the production. At lunch we talk about the incident he laughingly mentioned to me at breakfast: the King of Saxony is said to have been set upon and roughly handled by vagabonds during a hunt; an emperor in Russia who ran away, a king being thrashed - sore trials of respect!
For me and the children, the morning brought simple devotions in the house of mourning. All that now remains of spring is the wind, and a cold one. It is not kind of Heaven to repay R. in this way! On the other hand, he takes the liveliest pleasure in the children. He told me that often, when he saw himself with me and the children like this, he asked himself whether he was still the same person. “Eva in Paradise,” I recently exclaimed to our little daughter. R. took me up: “Siegfried in Valhalla, Isolde in life and in sorrow!” The fact that you have brought him pleasure, my children, this blessing will be with you all your lives - let me thank you!
In the evening we play whist with the elder girls. Before that he looks through the window, sees the new moon coming through behind a cloud, and calls us to look. To me he says, “It stands there so shyly, so questioningly, this inverted Cosima - but God sees her from the right side.” R. then reads some Carlyle to me, about the French Revolution, Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre - it gives us much enjoyment. However, he does not wish to read Malwida’s recently published book; he says at lunch, “I shall not read any book by a woman until you write one.” He does glance through one chapter but soon puts the book down, finding all the philosophizing distasteful: “They are all materialists, after all,” the ethics they derived from Schopenhauer, whose first book they did not understand, he says.