Sunday, December 9:
R. got up once during the night, but he says he did not sleep too badly; worry kept me awake. Christmas errands. R. works. In the afternoon a short walk. Grief on my return home - R. tells me that the Idyll has already been performed in Mainz, and he reads me the stupid words which accompanied the performance (that in it Fidi's joys are depicted!).
I knew when I made the sacrifice just what a sacrifice it really was, yet curiously enough this review affects me as if I had never foreseen it! I could not be more estranged from the world than I am, never less involved in its joys, less sympathetic toward its doings, yet at this very time I am obliged to yield to it my most cherished possession! I have the feeling, since I was obliged to yield it up, that I have proved unworthy of it - and I hasten to my room, there to weep and lament and once again accept within myself that my hard lot is just, that what I cherish must be yielded up as too sublime for me. Why should I alone be made happy, I alone be blissful? ... I see all the tears I have shed, hear the sound of all my lamentations, and my complaining relapses into silence, my tears dry up. To you alone I confide them, my Fidi - when you read these lines after I am dead, hear these sobs after I have vanished from sight, think of your mother - how she loved you and sadly sent you outside into a world from which she was already severed in her lifetime!
In the evening with the Wolzogens and the entire “flock” to see Die Teufelsmühle, an old memory of R.'s - but the performance worse than bad.