Friday, October 28:
Reunion with the children, followed immediately by lessons. R. tired, spends the morning reading the newspapers. After lunch R. overwhelms me with his heavenly love; he declares I am becoming more beautiful every day (oh, dear!) and he is dying of happiness.
Little is heavenly, he says, only Cosima is heavenly; looking at myself, I feel like the most inconspicuous of buildings which, in the rays of a sunset, can be made to look like the most splendid of sights. After he left me, he played a wonderful theme, which I begged him to write down.
Then Loulou returned from her piano lesson and told us that Bazaine had surrendered! So another 150,000 Frenchmen to be cared for; it sounds like a fairy tale. And only this morning we were reading in the newspaper that Kératry had declared that Bazaine was about to surround the Prussians!
In the evening R. says to me, “It is nice that we have Bazaine, but it is very much nicer that I have you.”