Saturday, August 6:
Letter from Judith. We read in the newspaper that the citizens of Weissenburg themselves took up arms against the Germans, against their own brothers. Shame on them! I should like to spend the whole day praying; each fresh piece of news summons my heart to meditation. How splendid the alliance between North and South Germany!
R. told us yesterday evening that, as he was returning from town, he met the policeman who guards the convicts; the man stopped him and asked him how things stood; Richter told him of the Prussian victory, whereupon the policeman: “Yes, the King of Prussia is a good man, he is the only one who will come to the Pope’s aid, the Pope himself has said the time will come when he will have to ask a Protestant for help!” When Richter today tells people in the town about this, they reply that all the convicts in Lucerne revere Louis Napoleon; the priest who visits them and is supposed to make them pious speeches talks only politics to them.
The Bund contains an extract from an article by Charles Hugo (son of the poet), in which he describes the Prussian army and compares it with the French army in a way one would not expect even from a Frenchman: that the Prussian commandants are being followed by brigands in turbans, and other things of that kind!!! What does such a nation deserve? But now, at this very moment, our soldiers are fighting and bleeding; may they be blessed and fortified, oh, God of Righteousness, help them! I write out a prayer for my children.
(Letter from Graz with 100 florins; Der fliegende Holländer has been a great success there; the money is welcome, for we are very short of it.) Twice already R. has found an opportunity to protest vehemently against so-called Swiss neutrality; once to our lawyer, who, when R. informed him of the victory at Weissenburg, replied that it was all the same to him; and yesterday to General (in the Neapolitan army) Schuhmacher; R. met him in the cigar shop, where everybody was awaiting the dispatches, and when they at last arrived and R. was reading them, the general said, “One cannot make head or tail of them,” and as a strategist he argued that the Prussians could not possibly have taken the fort if the French had intended to defend it, and other things of that kind, whereupon R. simply replied, “That is all very well, but one thing I can see: who is lying and who is telling the truth; the first the French are doing, the second the Germans.”
With that he left and went to his bookseller’s shop, where an English family was being shown the Totentanz [Dance of Death], painted here on the bridge. “Totentanz, Franzosentanz,” said R. to Richter. As he walked through the post office on his way home, the bookseller met him again and said, rubbing his hands: “You have just helped me to make 40 francs. The English boy, who understands German, had to explain your joke to his parents; they asked me who you were, I told them, and, laughing, they at once bought the picture book.”
We discuss in lively tones all the many things Germany owes to Count Bismarck; when one thinks of the previous Prussian ministers, and now of Beust and his consorts! He is a true German; that is why the French so hate him. The French newspapers say the King of Prussia had telegraphed, “Bloody, regrettable victory”!!! (Instead of “Brilliant but bloody victory.”)
Sunday, August 7:
I am writing these lines on Monday; yesterday went past in tears of the deepest emotion. At midday good Count Bassenheim rushed in and announced a German victory at Wörth; the Crown Prince had beaten MacMahon, the French troops had fled, there is talk of an uprising in Paris. In the evening the Countess sends her maid to tell us that Marshal Bazaine has also been beaten, though this is not yet confirmed. Our spirits lifted tremendously! Siegfried, our Siegfried, will find himself in a different world.