Friday, November 12:
R. is at rehearsal, returns particularly dissatisfied with Lucile Grahn. I, with Marie D[önhoff], found her exactly as she always was, very affectionate and charming.
R. with the children to the aquarium. In the evening he goes to hear an act of L’Africaine and says that, if he were to live in Vienna and be connected with the theater, he would never again raise a pen to write music, so profaned did it all appear to him.
The present times reminded him of Tannhäuser in Paris, he said, where, after nine years of seclusion in Switzerland, he had also been obliged to sit through the most worthless of works in order to assess singers, and he had felt then, as he does now, in a state of sin.