Friday, May 31:
R. had a bad night with wild dreams: his bedroom was separated from mine by several other rooms, next to his a tavern, from which noisy people closely overlooked his bed. He went to search for me, found me at last in my bed; an ugly old Polish count was sitting beside it, courting me, and I seemed to have no objection, while to R. I had pretended I was ill; then near my room the sounds of a tavern, which woke him up! "Then I said to myself: je sais ce que c'est," he tells me, quoting one of his favorite popular expressions from Hugo's Histoire d'un crime. "Je sais ce que c'est - must wake up, apply poultices, etc."
R. works. A light lunch with friend Feustel is responsible for R.'s drinking more wine than he is used to, and it upsets him; he has a headache. A lengthy rest in the summerhouse and short strolls do him good; he finishes The Antichrist. Coming back to Voltaire, he remarks on the superficiality which induced this great intellect to reject Christ, yet to uphold Jehovah. While he is reading Renan, I read the Purgatorio and then tell him episodes from it.
In the evening Kenilworth, embarrassing moments, for the writer seems almost to be spinning it out rather too long, but the scene of Elizabeth's anger is magnificent. At lunch friend Feustel says he voted against the government's repressive proposals with a heavy heart, whereupon R.: "Reaction is always a bad thing; we possess a very unconsidered piece of legislation and are now paying the consequences." The leaders of the socialist movement are no doubt muddled people and perhaps intriguers as well, but the movement itself belongs to the future, all the more so since we can think of no better ways of stopping it than taking foolish repressive measures. Napoleon III had at least understood his business enough to make his people rich and create jobs for them. But what do we do? We found a Prussian empire with Berlin as its capital! It is the same with the struggle against Rome, there too, just police measures, nothing that leaves the German spirit room to breathe. It is hopeless. Now the German Emperor is calling for more Christianity, and the most innocent meetings of the socialists, in which the deputies want, for example, just to report to their electors, are banned by the police!