Saturday, January 30:
Lovely sunshine. Mild weather; peaceful morning after a good night, in which as usual I dreamed about Blandine. Little to report on this day. In glorious spring weather spent a large part of the afternoon with the children in the garden. Richard well and I happy on that account.
In the evening he tells me that between us there is only one danger: that we love each other too much; every morning when he goes to his score and writes the first line he would like to run upstairs again at once and see what I am doing.
Dictation. In the course of it I am overcome by a heavy, heavy feeling, I cannot describe it, hardly know in fact what it consists of. Suffering, eternal, inscrutable suffering, may you be borne in silence! This last lesson I leave to my children: that the drink contained in the fairest chalice of unearthly happiness is a tear!
Richard notices my mood and, to raise my spirits, tells me how his father Geyer, to give his mother a surprise on her birthday, staged a charade in which a councilor, Jeorgie, a gigantically huge man, laid himself in Mama’s bed, dressed in her nightcap and bed jacket; he was given her big coffee cup, and the children summoned in their nightcaps and nightgowns to their mother’s bedside, as usually happened in the morning; the mother was then called in, to their great delight.
I had to laugh a lot. Then, once again, weep. At last, in lovely moonlight, I fell asleep.