Tuesday, December 3:
Again a bad night... I do not know how I can bear my worry and overcome it. Despite his fatigue he does some work. When I fetch him for lunch he says, “I have just been thinking of you and saying to myself, ‘I simply had to live with her, there was no help for it.’ ” But at table he is very absorbed, and over coffee he says, “I must have unlimited time for Parsifal.”
He sleeps in the afternoon longer than usual, then we stroll in the garden and afterward go together to visit our neighbors the Staffs. After the visit R. writes a few letters, but he feels run down, “heavy,” he says. He plays the first movement of the Pastoral with Lusch, then I read aloud some of W. Scott’s Life of Napoleon, without much enjoyment for either of us. He says it was Thiers who described the battles most vividly. “We are drinking wine already drunk,” R. says, making a play on G.’s words, which he says only Goethe could have written. As we are going up to bed we pass by the little Buddha: “I shan’t compose you,” says R. “How could one make anything of such a fellow in a blue cap?”