Tuesday, January 24:
Bismarck, Lt. General, refuses to give Jules Favre a safe-conduct to the conference; splendid! Everything reported about our people is great, and all the more does the world cry out against it.
Taught the children the New Testament. After lunch sleigh ride with R.; at the post office we find a letter from a soldier in Blois. A sergeant named Rudolph Nolte writes to R. with touching enthusiasm and encloses letters from one of his friends, Koch, a student of philology, who is excited by the idea of a national drama.
This reminds R. in the evening of his previously expressed wish that I send Countess Bismarck a copy of Art and Politics. I do not know why I find this so difficult to do, when I could so easily die for him. But thrusting myself forward in any way is something I find all but impossible.
In the evening Gibbon. Letter from my mother.