Friday, March 19:
Kos is now really back, but very much changed. R. works, I sit with the children, embroidering. The mail brings only an honorary diploma from the Linzer Gesangsverein and the Signale for R.
The latter contains a report maintaining that in a letter R. wrote that the French were tailors, and he would only go to them to have his jackets made. R. is demanding a retraction.
Vreneli tells us that Semper had said in Zurich that it had been in Wagner’s power to have the theater built, but W. had let the project drop! Still no news of the children.
R. tells me the people who are behaving so badly toward us will live to regret it. I do not desire even that. But I do want to see my children again.
At this hour of the evening six years ago I was feeling very unwell; unwell and at the same time wretched. How wearily and gloomily I brought my baby into the world, without any assistance; how indifferently did the father greet it! Only Richard, far away, was concerned about me, and I did not know it.
How dreary, how empty, how inwardly disturbed was my life at that time! How could I ever thank R. enough for what his love has done for me?
At that time I was feeling so wretched that I told nobody that my labor pains had come, and that the baby was already there when they summoned the midwife. My mother-in-law was living in the house, Hans was at home, there were servants in plenty, and I was walking up and down in the salon all by myself, wriggling like a worm and whimpering; a cry I could not suppress woke the household and they carried me to my bed, where Boni then crept out.
In every home a coming child is a time of joy, but I hardly dared tell Hans that I was pregnant, so unfriendly was his reaction, as if his comfort were being disturbed.
I have never told anyone about this before; now I am writing it down, not to complain about Hans (he had many worries on his mind, and he did not know what pleases and what hurts a woman, for I had always kept silent), but because I cannot think without shuddering of that night in Berlin, which serves to make utterly clear to me the subsequent course of my destiny.