Friday, September 23:
Work with the children, because the weather is cold and dull. R. writes letters (J. J. Weber, etc.) and corrects his Beethoven. At lunch he says that the parts of the biography just received have taken him back to the Baltic Sea, and he suggests reading E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story Das Majorat in the evening. The weather has cleared and we go for a splendid walk in the direction of Winkel, through many farms in charming and idyllic hill country. The lake stretches before us like a gulf, and the blue mirror of its surface (“Heaven at our feet”) transfigures the whole landscape. We go past the “Fontaine de Soif” (as in earlier times we had christened a little stream)—for the first time since our marriage. A deep inner joy over our seclusion, but thinking at the same time gratefully of our little children. “Without them,” R. says, “we should be too earnest, they provide distraction and draw us into the circle of their gay existence.”
In the evening R. reads Das Majorat, which has a curious effect on me. During the day R. had asked me whether horror stories would not frighten me. I smilingly denied it, but then began to think of ghosts and apparitions, deceased people, and finally of Daniel—this with a feeling of reproach; though his loss may have been due to my father’s having sent him to Vienna on the advice of Princess Wittgenstein, yet I blame myself now for not having saved him by going with him to Cairo; also I fear that I did not consult the right doctor when he was lying ill in my house. All this occupies my mind, and now chance will have it that at the first appearance of a ghost in Hoffmann’s tale the name Daniel should twice be called out. As R. spoke the name in that meaningful, penetrating tone so peculiar to him, I shivered—not in fear, but in unutterable pain. The story itself gripped me through the pregnancy of its description and the beauty of its atmosphere. I ask R. to permit me to sleep in his room, fearing otherwise to be unable to sleep on account of my melancholy thoughts. I am told I slept peacefully, yet the night was painful to me.
(Telegram of congratulations from Prince Georg of Prussia.)