Saturday, February 4:
A good night for R., but the cold is severe. However, we are cheerful in the morning, and our conversation soon takes off on a wide-ranging flight; the French Revolution, the terrible fact that now property is all that matters, Rousseau, and many other things enliven us as a brilliant sun shines down. At 12 o'clock we stroll with R. to the Villa Camastra and return home very pleased with Nature, but amused by our escort of two security guards, lent to us by an anxious Count Tasca!
In the afternoon I pay some calls with Lusch, and when I return home, I see R. returning from Camastra, still flanked by his two guards, and now very annoyed by it all. To conclude our outing I had decided to visit our owl with Lusch; we looked for it, could not find it, and were told that the fine bird is now dead. “He must have been pining for us,” R. says at first on hearing about it; then we tell ourselves how miserable the beautiful creature must have been in captivity. Fidi has a slight chill, I put him to bed right away.
The evening passes harmoniously; with the children we look at etchings of German history, and I even read aloud [Friedrich Wilhelm III's] “Call to My People”; but we are beset by uneasy feelings of having been rash in moving here, and I go to bed in a state of indescribable anxiety about R. At my recommendation R. has begun to read [George Sand's] Le Piccinino, after Count Tasca has told us the most curious stories about Valvo the bandit, and the visit paid him in the country by seven bandits, things which make the way in which we are guarded here understandable!