Wednesday, June 9:
R. slept well and comes to call me after his walk. Whether because of a dream or a chain of thoughts, I am looking “pensive”; R. asks me why, and I tell him that my reflections were concerned with love and happiness, how life always demands acceptance (for instance, that others have been loved before us), and the moment this turns into forbearance, the happiness one expects from love is lessened. R.: “The only refuge is faith, limitless faith, at the risk of being deceived; but even so one will have known faith.”
R. works and is satisfied with what he has done. I write to Herr Schron and to the gentlemen of the Academic Wagner Society in Vienna, but R. is displeased that I have not told the latter that he will never again go to Vienna. And he adds that he will himself tell them one day that he expects them to beat up a few reviewers. Malwida’s immediate departure provokes remarks from him about alienation and lack of affinity, due to people’s always having something else important to them, which determines what they are. And it is true that one must yield oneself to him entirely.
A lovely, idle afternoon spent beside the palm tree, where, however, it is somewhat cool. In the evening R. reads to us the letters of G. and Schiller concerning the distribution of Die Horen, since for him they so vividly illustrate German wretchedness.
When our friend Joukowsky remarks, over coffee in the afternoon, that he would campaign in Russia for our cause on the heir’s accession to the throne, R. says, “It would be a humiliation for us,” but he adds: “I must admit that it is precisely in Russia that there may be people, perhaps living on remote estates, who are concerned with the influence of the French and would therefore be the most likely ones to adopt my ideas. I expect nothing more from Germany.”