Wednesday, March 8:
It saddens us that the soldiers could have had so little pleasure from their entry into Paris. "The best thing about it," says R., "is the effect it had on the Parisians." We laugh over their silent appearance on the boulevards; they cannot stay in their homes, and there were certainly some mourning clothes to be seen: "contrition hats, resignation jackets, revenge gloves," and so on!
Richter has been in Zurich since yesterday; we are again alone at table, so the talk is more intimate. Speaking of his life, R. says: "If we had not come together, I should have grown very old and apathetic. Your father noticed it when he visited me here, in 1866. That shook me."
In the margin: "My desperate mood at that time drove me to those extravagances which I so profoundly regret."
Lusch still unwell; her tears of yesterday go to my heart, but everything hard is good for one!
We walk, R. and I, amid springtime storms into town, happy in our love, lots of birds in the trees. In the evening Richter returns; he tells us of a peace celebration held by the German students in Zurich. I feel offended that on such an occasion they did not think of R. "I am far away, am an opera composer, come perhaps a shade in front of Offenbach."
In the evening, discussion about Bayreuth. Then R. reads me the splendid canto in the Nibelungenlied in which the mermaids encounter Hagen. R. says it is the mythical basis which gives this poem its peculiar character.