Wednesday, December 21:
From General Headquarters Councilor Bucher sends his photograph. Still nothing encouraging concerning Paris, the French efforts have undoubtedly been underestimated by our people. R. has had another bad night. While we are drinking coffee in the downstairs salon, he looks up at the gallery and says he can recall the surprise he felt on his birthday in ’69, when he listened there to the quartet and saw for the first time the painted windowpane. “You must prepare no more such surprises,” he said, “for I can imagine how difficult it was for you all the time you were preparing it. In a love like ours it is surely almost unbearable having to conceal things from each other.” I admit to him that when he questioned me about my correspondence with Herr Müller over the quartet and always accepted my answers without question, I did feel deeply ashamed.
I advise him to consult a doctor in Basel or Zurich about his indisposition. “Best of all I should have liked to go to Strassburg, since I hardly know it, so as to see something else at the same time. Were there any good pictures there?” I mention some which were destroyed with the library. “Yes, one has to make up one’s mind whether all the treasures should be consigned to destruction without scruple, or whether one will put up with even the worst of conditions just in order to preserve them all.” “And then they really will be destroyed,” I said. “Yes, as the barbarians did with the Roman Empire. And what is art, after all? It is like the lovely blue flames which now and again flicker over a fire, while everything going on beneath them is destruction, annihilation. But that art should provide a light during a period rich in deeds—that indeed is the dream.”
I reply to my friend in Versailles, write to Countess B. enclosing the Christmas gifts. In the evening read Gibbon.