Sunday, September 5:
Not a good night, R. got up 5 times and was running a temperature. In such ways have the joys of Friday had to be paid for. When we spoke about that yesterday, he said, "Life is a task." Today, too, the doctor is not at all disquieted, but what help is that? I see him looking tired, his dear features pale and drawn.
He spends the whole day quietly lying down, I with him, finally reading to him a story by Tieck (Der Geheimnisvolle) which the children begged from the clergyman who says Mass in our house and talks to them and welcomes them in a very friendly manner. A former tutor with the Strozzis, he has been without occupation since the dissolution of the monasteries, has built himself a house with a chapel in the vicinity of our house, lives there with a weak-minded abbot, and now travels around (Spain, England, Egypt); he knows Bavaria well, possesses, among other things, the collected Fliegende Blätter, knows all of R.'s works, and would have come to Bayreuth if he had had sufficient means.
We laugh over this acquaintanceship of the children's and make use of his richly variegated and, it seems, rather unusual library. The story is unfortunately very flat; although its subject should have interested us, we do not finish it. In the evening R. seems to me to be running a temperature.