Monday, February 27:
R. slept well, but the weather is wretched, storm and rain; it makes us laugh to think that the tent was erected outside only yesterday! But this morning R. has no chest spasm; he is very careful with his sponge bath and manages thus to stave off an attack. R. begins a letter to the King and writes three pages about Fidi. He, still tired from yesterday, stays in bed and draws; his continued education gives us much to think about, where to find playmates as well as a tutor for him? This occupies R. and me during a drive into town. R. would like to take over Fidi’s history lessons himself, but he complains about always leading such a restless life - now fully taken up, for instance, with his Paris affairs.
In the carriage in town he suddenly calls out, “Very well, you gentlemen overflowing with ideas, try to write a melody like the Prelude to the first act of Tristan und Isolde!” Then some goats claim his attention, and he says, “They have proper Philistine faces, like tailors - a sheep expresses much more suffering.”
In the evening we begin Fathers and Sons with the children; I do the reading. At half past nine we break up, and R. and I spend a long time in his room in intimate conversation, in effusions of love! R. pays tribute to what he calls my courage and my sufferings, and when I tell him that it is only because of him that I was able to do it, he denies that and says no, he is not even permitted to advise me, for in matters of love the woman must take precedence; when I still maintain that it was he inside me and not myself, he exclaims: “Oh, no! To have any sense of himself, a man must be loved - the life-giving power is female. And things began to work again when you were with me - people had been saying that I would never do anything more, and then it all started again. One can live for a while on one’s inner resources, but then one must be shown a picture of oneself in a mirror to know what one really is.”
And he recalls the terrible circumstances in which I showed my belief in him, and also the good King, who stood by us loyally, “and for that reason one can say a few flattering things to him.” And his final words before going off to sleep: “It is now as it was on the first day, only better!”
[Added in margin: “On the drive home he tells me about Carlyle, whose biography he is reading, and he is pleased with the remark that he, Carlyle, vacillated between prophecy and comedy. Then R. expresses his surprise over his taking sides against the Negroes, saying how rarely a person is completely free; he feels that deism, the Jewish kind which inhibited even Goethe, also oppressed Carlyle’s spirit. R. is much amused by C.’s criticism of democratic government, in which he says that most of England’s 30 million inhabitants are blockheads. He describes as an ‘ironic ovation’ the fact that figures from his dramas were used in a masked procession in Leipzig, and that from the pilgrims a ‘Pulcinella and P. Carnival’ arose!”]