Monday, July 19:
the wildest of nights; at 4 o’clock R. and I find ourselves out on the terrace watching the sunrise. [Added in margin: “I notice a bat circling almost directly above R.’s head.”] R. points out to me the boats going out “to plunder,” and we gaze upon all this beauty with tired feelings of indifference.
All the same R. works, finishes his article, and is in consequence very cheerful at lunch, indeed boisterous. When I talk of the beauty of Schnorr’s mother and call it a real and not an apparent beauty, he turns to Lusch and says, “Not like your mother’s, which is already fading.” He talks about the powerful geniuses in Dresden, Schnorr, etc., and when I ask how it is possible that falseness should so have gained the upper hand in Germany, he says, “You can depend upon it, the Jews are to blame.”
Over coffee we talk about W. Meister; R. finds all the women in it somewhat unbearable, apart from Marianne, Mignon, and Philine; he likes Philine, he says, and he knew her, “Malchen Lehmann from the Böhmes’ house,” whom as a boy he liked to be with, he enjoyed stroking her curls. “I always blushed red as a beet when she came into the room.” And in speaking of the unbearable age of Louis XIV, having said gaily, “I don’t know whether I shall get old, but unbearable certainly.” [A marginal note based on untranslatable wordplay omitted.] Recently he said that, if he is to be painted now, he must be made to look as he was about 12 years ago, for the signs of age have become too apparent. I believe that genius retains all its beauty in old age.
In the afternoon he reads his work to me (conclusion), and I am enchanted by it. Before that he had read my words about the Wittelsbach celebration, and he praises them so highly that it would be coldness in me to describe myself merely as happy on this afternoon during which he confides to me the richness, profundity, and greatness of his thoughts and at the same time welcomes my few words as a melody. “Mine is a fugue, yours a melody.” Thus in defiance of all that is bad or evil we pass as if in a trance into the evening; a flaming meteor, as it falls, takes with it the single wish (wahnlos hold bewusst) I cherish, eternity will fulfill it for me.
Around 11 o’clock we go to bed, after R. has taken a coal-tar bath, but all too soon he leaves his bed, and since he does not return, I follow him; in silence we sit on the terrace, bathed in light, hear strange sounds, a woman whose call is reminiscent of Hungarian melodies; then we leave the terrace and stroll in the garden before the door, exchanging words and lost in contemplation. The loveliest night, perhaps, that we have ever experienced. My whole being immersed in his, in the richly consoling sea of his thoughts, and both of us silently lost in the still, mild glory. He laughs at the idea of wanting to sleep when one cannot. Memories of Sulzer.
Between 2 and 5 we go to bed, and at 9 o’clock on