Tuesday, March 28:
R. gets up early after a good night, and we have breakfast in cheerful silence, since I fear the effect of stimulating conversation on him. When he asks me why I am silent, I tell him the things which are occupying my mind - the letter to Hans about Boni, and Siegfried's education. (R. has already abandoned his idea of advertising; he says he can imagine the sort of children who would be sent to him and what difficulties one would be piling on oneself.) [A sentence based on untranslatable word play omitted.]
As I am writing my letter to Hans, the maid tells me that R. is having a severe attack, I hasten to him and am confronted with a sight which so affects me that I faint. I soon pull myself together again and return to R. from the bed on which I have been laid; his condition gradually becomes calmer, he is given electric treatment, starts joking again: “If only Baron Pennisi were to come today!” and: “My intestines are tying themselves in knots, so as to remind themselves of something.” But he is very run down.
Only yesterday we were talking about our end; I wished to do everything I could to be worthy of dying with him. He said that we must live, and this is much more difficult. My fainting today has now given me hope. Oh, my Siegfried, should I leave you before I have set you firmly on your path, remember me, be good and brave, flee from all that is contemptible, avoid all the usual distractions, honor noble women, shun all others!
The doctors say attacks like this are not dangerous, but when I see him in such a condition, see him suffering, groaning, and there is nothing anyone can do, then, dear God, my strength deserts me!
We pass the day quietly together. At about three o'clock R. has some food, and afterward he talks to me about Henry VIII, which he has been reading, admiring how freely Shakespeare has drawn this character; he says Kleist would never have permitted himself anything like it, even in the figure of the Elector Prince, so enslaved are we by court restrictions: “It is all Assyria,” R. says. He shows me the remarkable passage in which the Queen forbids Griffith to answer the summons. We spend the evening quietly alone. I read the Lohengrin text, and R. recalls that when he read it to Laube in his sister Luise's house, Laube said that the development of the second act was good throughout, but one ought to see Ortrud performing acts of magic in the background - the psychological processes meant nothing to him.