Friday, April 8:
Cheerful morning, the children constantly in the garden, on account of the weather. R. works, I embroider and prepare summer clothes. Letter from Heinrich Forges apologizing for the Walküre intervention. With Countess Bassenheim at the dancing lesson. On the wooden bridge encountered the former Lieutenant Müller, whom I had not seen since Zurich with R. (1857); this made me feel embarrassed.
“You must not cry because we are so happy,” said R. to me yesterday, when he embraced me and I as usual could only weep. “I wrote Art and Revolution under just such an impression as that of the Symposium now,” R. says, and, when I tell him how hard it is for me to talk to people when all they understand is just success and non-success, he says: “You are right; everything is a compromise, even the fact that I allow Lohengrin and Tannhäuser to be regarded as operas; it is terrible: if I were independent, a man of means, I would not give my things to any theater.” “There ought really to be a prytaneum set up in Germany, which would say to me, for instance: Your things will be produced everywhere, for that you will receive such and such an allowance, but the works will belong to the nation, for it is shameful to receive money for such things, to see them regarded as mere goods,” R. says to me on receiving a fee from Hamburg for Der fliegende Holländer.