Wednesday, July 17:
A fine day at last, after perpetual cold! The Bayreuther Blätter arrives, and R. is pleased with the articles by Gl. and by W., regretting only some repetitions in “The Fight with the Dragon.”
Lunch with the Gl.’s, looked at the caricatures by Kietz, the words beneath the King of Hanover were written by R.
R. comes up to my room in the afternoon; Herr Jauner has sent him a nice signet, which he earmarked for him during the festival. R. thanks him with friendly gaiety. I know of nobody who is so appreciative of small attentions as R.
In the evening R. sups with me in the little gray room, lovely sunset, his shining eyes are turned to the heavens, sun to sun: “How little one is conscious of one’s individuality!” he exclaims. “How could one otherwise feel at home in the universe? If one tells oneself that in a few years all this will end, how can one delight in it? Yet one does delight in it, because individuality means nothing.”
To take my mind off my indisposition I have gone back to Balzac’s novel, which I like more than almost anything else; even its exclusively Catholic character seems to me justified; it provides the firm framework indispensable to any work of art; the thoroughgoing praise R. recently bestowed on this great writer suggested it to me.
In the evening R. reads to me from this novel, Le Curé de village — the scene in which Véronique’s servants tell her in their own way about the life of “Farrabesche,” and their peasant speech makes us laugh heartily. “What a gifted man he is!” R. exclaims in the middle of his reading. He reads it to me with complete fluency.