Tuesday, July 30:
R. slept well. "Our evening alone together did me good," he says. The girls somewhat better; I repress my worried thoughts about the elder ones.
At breakfast R. mentions the four most original characters literature has given the world: Hamlet, Falstaff, Don Quixote, and Sancho. He works; at lunch we decide on a drive, but the sky soon clouds over again and we give up the idea. R. reads Balzac and writes to his lawyer in Dresden; he says that, by refusing to allow a note of his to be played there, he wants to find out who can hold out longer, he or the Court theater. In this letter he gives himself another ten years of life, which makes me shudder!
They are maintaining in Dresden that, when he was a conductor there, he was under obligation to write operas for the theater! Toward evening Loldi very unwell, running a temperature; the doctor says reassuringly that it is just a slight intermittent fever; I spend a part of the evening with her and then take her into my bed; R. muddles us up, says, "The large one and the small one."