Wednesday, July 5:
Rain again. Letter from an American, J. Lang, whom I met fourteen years ago in Berlin and who offers support for Bayreuth. C. Mendès sends us his book about the Commune. In Paris madness and baseness; R. is alarmed by the thought that Prussia might not have crushed the people sufficiently and might soon have to begin all over again.
At lunch R. tells me that he has had all sorts of trouble and difficulties with his work. Things look bad, it seems, with our lawsuit. “Why must one build golden bridges for the devil? I should have thanked God that we escaped as we did, and not thought of justice. There is a stupid sort of optimism about seeking justice. I have now resigned myself to having to pay all the legal expenses and heaven knows what else.”
Our landlord is also behaving badly, after R. has put so much into his house. R. says: “I feel as if one is always dealing with crooks; one is full of trust, but the other is merely waiting for one to lay oneself open through this trust.” The town council now requires us to apply for a residence permit, just as we are thinking of leaving. And on top of all that the wretched weather; we now reckon to have had ten months of rain, cold, fog, frost.
With the children in the salon. In the evening R. tells me that the greatest male virtue, one of which the French know nothing, is obedience. “Fidi must be obedient; I will get a grip on myself and support you better than I do with the girls, when I always intervene, which is very wrong of me. A boy who has never learned obedience is lost. I grew up in the wildest of anarchy; it had to be, for then as later no known method ever fitted me, but how much should I have been spared if I had been accustomed to obeying! To my sister I was just a wild and forsaken being who never conformed.”
Letters from E. Ollivier, asking me for papers, on the assumption that my father had arranged a dowry for me as for Blandine. I reply that I was given nothing, and remind him of the jewelry which my mother’s father had given me and Blandine, which I had signed over to Blandine and which he had illegally withheld from me; probably this will be met with silence. Letter from Claire; things look bad with my mother. Letter from C. Mendès. “One must treat these people like children.”