Saturday, December 18:
R. woke up suddenly and with such violence that he upset the table beside his bed; half grumbling, half joking, he picks up the objects and settles down again to sleep, which soon comes. We get up early, and each of us goes to his day’s work. He begins it by reading Amadis (by Count Gobineau), which particularly pleases him, he believes, because it followed Schelling; he would sooner have spent his time reading the dreariest tract of a Protestant theologian than that nonsense.
We go for a walk at one o’clock in pleasant air and visit friend Jouk., who is suffering from rheumatism, but whose nice furnishings please R. At lunch we have the mayor, friend Feustel, and Wolz. Many reminiscences of Italy, then discussion of the present state of the Society of Patrons and plans for a meeting.
R. and I then go for a walk, are caught in the rain; we are glad to have such friends as Feustel and the mayor. R. says, “It gives me so much confidence when businessmen like that show faith in a cause which seems so nebulous even to me.”
The evening brings news from Italy about Tristan und Isolde and the “Ride of the Valkyries” which makes us smile (enclosed a letter from Tesarini and an Italian concert program dated December 17, 1880). But R. looks run down. Was he not pleased with his work? He is also easily irritated, as by the subject of Siegfried’s education; I hoped to have arranged things satisfactorily with Herr Vogler, the head teacher, but R. wants a house tutor and is annoyed at always being surrounded by incompetent people who are unable to help him.
I suggest a reading, and we choose Cervantes’s Rinconete and Cortadillo, which gives us tremendous enjoyment. The evening passes; we go upstairs, and when we are alone in R.’s little room, he begins to talk about Hans, with indignation on account of his behavior toward Lusch. He recapitulates the whole relationship and wants to write to him. I advise him that it would be better to state his feelings to Hans’s cousin Frege, along with a repayment of the Bülow fund. A sad conversation; R. tells me this was the reason for his irritation: to hear about the performance of the 9th from friends who went to hear it (Gross, etc.), this cut him to the heart.
His decision calms him somewhat, we go to bed, but soon he starts again, asks me many things about the past, and thus the night is a very restless one. R. gets up and reads; at last he falls asleep.
Frau Degele has sent a photograph with a request for an inscription for her husband. R. complies: “All honor to women, for here is a wife who weaves photographs into Herr Degele’s life.” Yesterday we were speaking of my age, and Lusch gave me one year less than is due to me, whereupon R.: “Whatever you do, take nothing away, for this is our pride, like the tines for a stag; with every year our antlers grow prouder.”