Tuesday, January 18:
R. is rather unwell, has a buzzing in his ears. When we part after breakfast, he embraces me: “Blessings on you, pardon everything as I beg your pardon for still being here, for by rights I should long ago have joined the hammerklavier.” He comes downstairs later, supplies a dedication to Mimi in the biography, looks at clothing fabrics, since he wants new paletots for his children; I feel that the old ones are still all right, but he wishes it.
Over coffee we talk a lot about Semper; only recently he recalled with pleasure that he bought a copy of the text of Tannhäuser for himself. He remembers that Semper worked out his book on style during late sessions in the tavern with Herwegh, and that Herwegh was a good listener. When mention is made of his great admiration for the French, R. says, “They possess the ideality of our reality.” At lunch he complained of his catarrh and said he would like to be given two slaps on the face at once, so that the cold would fall out through his nose!
Added in margin: “At lunch R. again proclaims his intention of living to be 94.”
A walk in the palace gardens, delight in shs. Quaker (Fidi), who, R. thinks, looks exactly like my father in his hat and long paletot. “All of the children must turn out like your father, I shall just keep Eva!” He works before supper, and after it Fidi does some magic tricks for us. Then we read Gobineau’s story, and R. is pleased with this new acquaintance, so rare a mind; he praises the Cervantes-like flavor of his stories.
In the evening, stretched out in his big chair in his dressing room, he says, “And now I am supposed to be looking forward to Parsifal, to coaching Jäger.” But when, to distract him from all solemn thoughts, I admire his robe, which is pink, he says, “Yes, this is what makes me feel good, something Feustel would find it completely impossible to understand.” Yesterday, when we were passing through his workroom, he caught sight of my picture over the piano, but he talks about the other pastel drawing by Lenbach: “It looks at me in a ghostlike way, reminding me of all that is solemn and good.”