Sunday, February 7:
Restless night and severe headache. Today was Saint Richard’s Day; in earlier times I should never have let this day pass without reminding my beloved jokingly of his supposed patron saint with a little gift. Now I cannot, for what little I have of my own I left at the household in Munich, and so the small pleasure must be done without.
Oh, I do not mind doing without things; it seems really always to have been my natural lot to abstain, to wish for nothing. I find it easy to believe that another age would have regarded me as a religious fanatic. Now love has got me fully in its grasp; I know nothing else and am willing to suffer in and for it.
Since the weather was fine, R. invited me to go for a walk with him; I did so. For the first time in two and a half months I walked outside the boundaries of Tribschen, with some concern lest I be seen. But I noticed nobody.
In the morning Levi, the conductor, sent a letter reporting the success of Die Meistersinger in Karlsruhe. As R. remarked at table, people are seeming to become a little nervous of being so much against him now, when, with his last work to be published, he has at the same time written his most popular.
A performance of Tannhäuser is announced for tomorrow in Basel. Our people are going to it. How hard it would have been for me previously not to go; I believe virtually impossible, and how calmly I now bear what is for me truly a great deprivation! I feel very low and would so much like to be cheerful. The children are well.