Friday, September 16:
Letter from Prof. Nietzsche, who seems to be deeply upset; then from my mother, who is rather hurt by my frank opinion of France. R. has a letter from the publisher Fritzsch in Leipzig, he will print the Beethoven essay. Still cold, inhospitable weather, worked with the children. In the evening a letter of congratulation to R. from Frau von Schleinitz; to me one from poor Claire, who is quite disconsolate. Paris is now cut off, we shall hear nothing for some while.
Yesterday we again began talking about the French character, and R. said one had only to look at their folk dance, the cancan, to know what sort of people they are. What a dance expresses—the wooing of the man, the flight, and then the renewed rousing of the woman, expressed with such charming naïveté in Spanish dances—all this one is expected to discern in this folk dance; he professes to see something of the cancan in the quadrille.
During the evening R. suddenly disappeared and did not return for a long time, then he came back, but sent Richter out, and so it went on mysteriously through the whole evening; I then found out that there had been five bats in R.’s room, everybody was alarmed, and R. did not wish to say anything about it to me, since he knows I am superstitious in this respect. It did upset me when I heard of it, but then, taking a grip on myself, I prayed that whatever disaster might threaten I might still carry out my duties as a Christian, a wife, and a mother.