Friday, June 13:
R. had a good night, except that toward the end he had his dream, as he calls it, about his wife Minna: “This time the mere sight of her was enough to wake me.” Our morning is so sweetly cheerful that we can find no end to our words of love; R. follows me out yet again, and during our embrace we tell each other laughingly that it is now time to be serious! He starts on his article: “I must do something, even if it only makes you laugh.”
At lunch, when the conversation is about performances, he says he does not wish to attend any apart from our house festivals! Wet weather-“horrible,” as R. says, but we are able to take a short walk in the palace gardens; in spite of the dismal sky, delight in Wahnfried, in our life together: “We are so happy,” R. exclaims.
When Herr R. is with us in the evening, there is talk of war with France being inevitable; R. says this would be a great catastrophe, and he would not send Siegfried into it-we should have made it impossible on the last occasion for France ever to cause trouble again. This morning R. was talking about the facial features of the French, and he said they lacked something-they were neither German nor Italian, and there was a smudged quality about them. But how sad it is to have to tell ourselves that we would take part in a war “coldly,” as R. puts it, after having followed the great deeds of 1870 with such feelings of sympathy!