Wednesday, February 23:
As a result of an agitated night in which all the deceased came back to me, I find myself speaking of Blandine’s death. “One becomes a quite different person,” says R., “when one has experienced things like that. To have to tell oneself that a person such as Blandine has vanished from the earth! Yes, and Schnorr’s death, how terrible it was — one survives it, but one is never quite the same again. If Schnorr had not died, our fate would probably have been a different one, we should have sacrificed ourselves, as we did at the beginning. Without him there was no longer any hope for our kind of art.” He ended his afternoon meditation with a smile: “In place of Schnorr we now have Fidi.”
Then he goes diligently to work. He has crossed out a passage — “I wanted to make things easy for myself, now it gives me no rest.”
After lunch to Countess B., whose daughter is ill. Her son, just returned, tells me much about Vienna; an aristocratic cousin had told him that the reason why the present princes are so weak is that they are intimidated by the Freemasons!
In the evening finished The Wasps.