Saturday, November 26:
R. reports in the morning that Paris is expected to capitulate next week.
When I pass on some news from the paper, he says: “You are so dear to me; however proud and refined you are, you are so familiar to me; you are my only intimate, everything else is alien. My life would no longer be possible without you. If you had said tut-tut and pulled back, I shouldn’t have let go. I should have toadied to you like Turgenev with Mme Viardot—that would have been a fine sight!”
Talking of the third act of Siegfried, he says, “Siegfried’s manner of wooing is really good, and the way he calls on his mother—well, that is religion: when the individual forgets himself and applies his happiness to the whole universe.”
Moving on to Shakespeare, he says, “The fact that we know for sure that Sh. lived gives us proof of Homer’s existence.” In the afternoon arrival of Prof. Nietzsche. Music (Richter and I), in the evening R. reads aloud his Nicht kapituliert.