Thursday, July 24:
R. works in unusually close weather. After lunch he tells me that the people at the Riedelsberg had spoken triumphantly of the mediatization of the princes. “Who mediatized them?” R. had asked. “Napoleon. And now there they are, driven into the clutches of the Jesuits and the Jews, because they no longer have any significance, yet they still stand above the law. In earlier times the nobility occupied itself with literature; now Paul Lindau, etc., rule over that!”
Visit from Herr von Meyern, the former theater manager in Gotha. We go to the theater with him. He seems to be a very good person, and yet he asks R., among other things, whether he will not abandon myth after the Nibelungen to shed glory on the modernistic tendencies - and he is a devotee!
We Kaspar Hauser-ize a bit in the evening.