Sunday, May 2:
May delights out of doors! Got up early, sent Boni off to church with Hermine, I at home with the other three. The doctor finds Loldi indisposed and prescribes something for her. I tell Loulou about Saint Louis and read with her the scene in Wilhelm Tell in which the hero shoots the apple. She weeps, and I with her. At table R. asks her what a hero is; she does not know, whereupon he says: Someone who knows no fear.
After lunch, with the two elder children and the little Am Rhyn girl to the fair in town: carrousel, menagerie, mines, panorama! R. had a letter from his friend Fraulein Meysenbug: she has received nothing, neither the Jewish pamphlet nor his letter of March 29. He replies to her; to my great astonishment he invites her to come here permanently. R. is also not quite well, but he goes into town with me.
When I look at the children and feed on their joy I have to acknowledge how foolish it is to expect any personal joy in this world, to wish for something for oneself such as a house or wealth or power or some such thing, when the only true happiness is the gleam of joy in the eyes of a cherished being.
While still in bed yesterday I read Der arme Heinrich; Goethe is said not to have liked it, which I can understand, even if there are many very moving features in it. "Wounded love has a friend in Heaven," a fine old saying which contains all the consolation of renunciation.
In the menagerie R. and I had to laugh heartily when the man said about the hyena, "It murders not just for hunger, but also for lust."