Sunday, January 9:
In the morning R. gets down again to his composing and sketches the opening to the prologue of Götterdämmerung. I read Grimm's fairy tales to Loulou and feel pleased that she much prefers these to the Andersen ones.
Lunch with the children, without Lusch, who is still in bed; the others have colds, too. After lunch Bayer, the lawyer, who gladdens R. greatly by telling him that once we are married the christening of Fidi will cause no difficulties at all. R. very happy, as if a burden had been lifted from him!
At supper he spoke about his godfather, Träger, in Leipzig, whose bluestocking of a wife was his first encounter with an intellectual woman, Aspasia type! From her he first heard the words "architectonic relationships"; she used them to Rosalie in connection with the stage decorations at the Leipzig theater, which Rosalie thought bad. At the age of twelve R. had read Die Jungfrau von Orleans to her; she had asked him to do so. His godfather gave him a blue-gray dress coat and a red Turkish waistcoat from his own wardrobe; this caused his mother great amusement, but R. was impervious to her gibes, for his rich godfather's dress coat, altered to fit him, had a silk lining.
Letter to me from Krausse, the painter, about R.'s supposed illness, and from an unknown young man in Vienna came a very touching and anxious inquiry as to whether he really was ill.
In the evening finally laid Tristram Shandy aside with a feeling of aversion, and began on the Vita nuova, pedantically mystical, says R. Profoundly moved by the canzona in which Dante sees Beatrice lying dead! "This is the genesis of all poetry," R. says. It leads me to the second act of Tristan, which I read again with delight.