Saturday, March 16:
R. did not have a very good night; he had to get up once; he tells me his dream: “I was with Pope Pius IX; he received me in a friendly way, in a sort of office, but then he suddenly said, ‘You are supposed to be a very bad man, a heretic.’ I: ‘There are such things as libels.’ ‘No, no, I know. You are Russian?’ ‘Oh, then you mean Rubinstein.’ ‘Perhaps. Is his name Richard?’ ‘Oh, then you do mean me, but you know how the newspapers lie.’ ‘Yes, I do know that, and I see from your face that you are an honest man.’ ” After that they said nothing but nice things to each other, and R. thought to himself, “Oh, Lord, you’ll have to kiss his hand now.” He did so. Cordial parting, exchanging “humble servants” with the very impressive-looking Pope, who accompanied him to the door and then, from a lighted chapel into which he had withdrawn and whose door stood open, looked around at R., and nodded when R., on his way out, looked around again.
At breakfast reminiscences of our Italian journey; concerning Verona R. says, “It is a sign of vigorous life in a city when monuments such as those of the Scaligeri are set up in narrow alleys and corners.”
R. works and comes in cheerful mood to give me the Fliegenden Blätter, which he finds very entertaining. “It is a truly German periodical,” he says. Downstairs he finds a composition, Durch Kampf Sieg [“Through Battle to Victory”], which he calls Durch Dampf zum Bier [“Through Steam to Beer”]. He sings bits from it; astonishment over its amateurishness: “People have learned nothing from me,” says R.
A report on the Idyll: “I ought to be pleased when something sensible is said about it, not on account of the praise, but that there is somebody who knows how to listen to such things.” In the afternoon R. goes for a walk, far beyond the Sophienberg, as he tells me, trying to find us. I had gone to the theater with the children for a rehearsal and consequently could not go to meet him. He works but is interrupted; annoyance over this, and late in the evening I express regret for not having kept it from him: “Yes, when somebody comes and you are not there, I howl like Wana for Brange.” He had previously told us that he wanted to take the little dog with him on his walk; at first she had been frightened to go past the railings into the street, then she complained when he left, so he returned and took her with him, but when she saw Brange chasing across the fields the little creature began to whine and howl!
Read Waverley, great delight in the old Baron, R. thinks him one of the most successful of Walter Scott’s characters.
I do not know why I am so beset this evening by gloomy fears, everything startles my heart, R.’s room, everything. When R. said, “With what different feelings will our children cross this hall!” (he meant less weighty feelings), I felt a shudder go through me. Oh, happiness - too heavy a crown for a human head! How uncertainly it bears thee! But in the tender embrace which a moment ago preceded our final words to each other before parting, my fears vanish; God in His Heaven will not desert me! ... This afternoon R. spoke of a thought which sometimes strikes him and which could drive him mad: the possibility of a child’s falling seriously ill and its life being in danger.
At supper the nastiness of people toward my father: “He is living now like his own shadow,” R. says. How few people recognize that he opened the way for R.! “Well, what Liszt can do we can surely do, too.” And without Liszt, R. says, “I cannot imagine what would have happened to my things - possibly I should be moldering beside Reissiger and his Schiffbruch der Medusa.” The same for all the rest of my father’s experiences, with Joachim, Raff, etc., “for he was able to do far more for others than I could.” Contract with Brunswick signed.