Wednesday, June 19:
When I ask R. how he slept, he replies, “Excellently!” He gets up at 6 o’clock, goes, as he says, “wherever I won’t meet the Dauphin,” walks for two hours in the palace gardens, and returns home for breakfast, during which he talks to me at length about Christ and Christianity: “If the world were truly Christian, it would virtually cease to exist.”
The poor brewery assistant has died: an incident of shocking heartlessness. R. has read Renan’s Caliban and thinks it very childish, about which he is really sorry. Friend Wolzogen reads some articles aloud to me, R. laughs at our conventicle.
In the evening on the balcony with R.; delight in the black birds, a male bird comes frequently to my feeding ledge and sings, R. says, “I am really sorry that he hasn’t yet found himself a mate.”
At lunch he talked about the sins of the princes; turning to me, he says, “And you have utterly spoiled Barbarossa for me with your Arnold of