Saturday, May 7:
More children’s coughs! In the morning R. exclaims to me, “You really are a miraculous woman, I have just been considering your letter to Franziska Ritter, it is perhaps the finest thing you have ever done.” (Some ill feeling had arisen, which I was attempting to dispel.) Then he comes to me and we get on the topic of Berlioz’s memoirs, which he is now reading. “In him one can so clearly see the reciprocity between natural inclinations and external conditions and relationships. Everything in Paris is horrible to him, and yet he cannot give it up—this horribleness is for him the whole world. His main grief was opera, which he could never master.”
Newspapers from Vienna; a passage in which it is maintained that the Eroica foretells Wagner particularly displeases R.: “I find it horrible when people compare me with Beethoven; I always feel like saying, ‘What do you know of B.?’” I explain to him how I think it is meant (a glorification of the Germanic character, not of Napoleon, hence a pointer toward Wagner). He laughs and says his consciousness has outgrown him. (In his letter to the King he had called me his consciousness.)
We really had to laugh yesterday when Jakob told us that the old lamplighter at the Schweizerhof (who always greets R. with a “Good morning, Herr Richard Wagner”) has just recovered from a mortal illness; now he goes around picking camomile flowers and eating them; he also puts a few on his nose during the night, in order to prolong his life, yet all the while he is declaring, “Oh, dying is splendid!”
R. says that Berlioz’s memoirs have strengthened his resolve never again to have anything to do with Paris. Fun over Fidi’s profession (surgeon), but we stick to our opinion, for a person must have a definite calling. R. is not well and in an agitated state, but all the same he works a little. I am very worried when he is indisposed, worried and grieved. In the evening began on Phaedo.