Friday, January 8:
Dear Loulou and dear Boni, today is your father’s birthday; I wish that he may spend it in a mood of peaceful reconciliation, though there is nothing I can contribute toward it. It was a great misunderstanding that bound us together in marriage; my feelings toward him are today still the same as twelve years ago: great sympathy with his destiny, pleasure in his qualities of mind and heart, genuine respect for his character, however completely different our temperaments.
In the very first year of our marriage I was already in such despair over this confusion that I wished for death; many errors arose out of my distress, but I was always able to get a grip on myself again, and your father knew nothing of my sufferings. I do not think he will withhold his testimony that I always stood by him, in suffering as in joy, and that I helped him to the best of my powers. Never would he have lost me if Fate had not brought me together with the man for whom I had to recognize it as my task in life to live or die.
I have not a single reproach to make to your father, even if our last years together were hard for me beyond all imagining. I wanted to try combining my former existence with my new life, I believed in the possibility of fusing together all the diverging feelings. Abuse and insults proved to me that I was being a fool, and all that remained was for me to make the choice that was no choice. Thus I am now deprived of you, my children, and it worries me greatly, but there is a God who helps.
In the morning I wrote to Boni and Marie Muchanoff. I go around all day feeling rather wretched, for the weather is unfavorable. Richard and I recalled the previous year, in which we celebrated Hans’s birthday all together and were still full of hopes and much good will.
In the afternoon the Italian score of Rienzi arrived, as well as the Cinque Canti, which gave us less delight. Then with the children, until they were in bed. After a conversation on table-turning, about which we are not of the same mind, Richard thinks it is the result of some mechanical law, I that it is fraud, we decided on three cantos from the Odyssey, only I am so tired that I can scarcely listen, and lose much of what is read. Today I felt in my womb the first stirrings of the unknown being within me.