Thursday, September 15:
Letters from R.’s sisters, both (Klara and Cäcilie) are glad about R.’s marriage to me. Letter to me from Karl Tausig. We read Wolfgang Menzel’s pamphlet on Alsace and Lorraine; it accords with R.’s views. The great question now is what the Germans will do—restore Napoleon, more and more of whose dirty financial transactions (the real cause of the war) are coming to light? Negotiate with the republic, which is still behaving in a hostile manner? R. is in favor of a long occupation and French disarmament, and is glad that the matter has assumed such dimensions. “The French,” he said, “are driven by their fate, and the Germans borne along.”
Great joy in Fidi, who during our family lunch crawls everywhere; afterward I go with R. to find a winter hat for him—all of them too tight for his head! As R. says good night to me, he declares, “I live on your love.” I lay down, feeling that the only true thing in my life has been my union with him; everything else I have done, what I have suffered and experienced, all this I drag around like a bad dream, or like prison chains from which I have been released; an eternal warning and reminder in the bliss of Paradise of how terrible life is and how wretched the mortal being. My contemplation ends with a prayer, a prayer of thanksgiving, a prayer for pardon, deep acknowledgment of my unworthiness.