Thursday, November 16:
R. slept well; at breakfast we discuss Lusch’s projected stay in Berlin and decide against it. We arrange a rendezvous on the Piazzetta and meet there on the stroke of one, after I have visited the palace and the library with Fidichen. The fine weather puts R. in a good mood; he has also started a letter to the King and is satisfied with it, even though he admits that he finds hyperbole rather difficult at his age. The glass of his watch is broken; we seek out a watchmaker and, while it is being replaced, go into Saint Mark’s through the canal under the Bridge of Sighs, a newly discovered entrance the darkness of which Fidi at first finds frightening. As ever we are overcome by feelings of well-being inside its space, and R. also finds pleasing the thought that it is open to the poor. Fidi rows us home. At the entrance to the palazzo we find R.’s former commissionaire, Zuski, along with a Turk offering Oriental covers; and this is in fact the same man who caught R.’s attention the previous evening in the café under the arcades, on account of his striking facial features. R. tells me a very droll story about Zuski: how, when R.’s rent was due at the Palazzo Giustiniani, he had no money with which to pay it; he asked Zuski to borrow it for him with interest; the latter soon brought it to him and told him he had got it from the landlord himself, who lent out money on interest! This brings us, laughing, to Giustiniani. Then he gives Lusch a postcard [enclosed in the Diaries; see notes], to be answered with the remark that one should not bet. We then talk about Tegnér’s watering down of Frithiofs Saga and the stupidity of such inquiries. Over coffee, drunk today for the first time for several days, he looks at the fabrics, but Byzantine things have no appeal for him, nor do secondhand goods. He rests in the afternoon; struggles with the geographical minutiae of the Persian history and decides that our friend has overtaxed his powers; with him, he says, it was not a case of “grinding” like some dry academic, since he was after all a poet, but rather the result of excitement and the urge to prove that he was no amateur, also his desire to clear up the matter of the races. Today he did not have a spasm!
In the evening we talk about our various letters, his from the Chiemsee district, containing a long history of a convent, mine from Jouk. and Liechtenstein; the former enclosed a sonnet by Michelangelo, which pleases R., too: “He had an idea there,” he says. Then from Lohengrin (third act) he plays me the march and sings the final narration, and when I hear that and see him, I am almost frightened by my feelings of happiness! Why should I be so happy? And in such a way, in such measure! How to prove worthy of it? ... This moves me to a prayer; I call upon the power that granted me all this, and bless both it and every suffering I have ever known or will know - a small return for my glorious fate! We talk about Lohengrin, his naïveté: “Since it is never in doubt that he will have to leave, it is possible for him to be so naïve and simple.” We remark how few people understand this commandment or even recognize its necessity; and now they talk about the loving woman, for whose sake he should have been permitted to reveal his secret, stay with her, and possibly even have children. But the folk tale accepts without question that he will have to depart. As we were leaving Saint Mark’s today, R. said he would like to stage all his works in Bayreuth, then bring Siegfried to the point where he could assume control; that would mean living another ten years, “for at the age of 23 a man already shows what he has in him.”