Tuesday, September 10:
Again a wretched night for R.; he gets up, reads Herr Lipiner’s book about the revival of religious ideas, his own essay “Public and Popularity,” which pleases him very much with the concentration of its arguments, and the beginning of Louis XI’s reign in Barante.
In the morning he tells me the terrible dream which woke him up: we were on a journey, and he called to me that the bedroom contained a double bed, whereupon I said, “You can sleep in it alone.” Hurt, he asked me whether something had offended me. I replied, “It’s not impossible,” whereupon he went into my room, where I had set up a sort of bed for myself; then my stepsister Claire Charnace came in, also scornful in her manner toward him. He was reminded of a dream in which increasing numbers of people gathered to mock him, “Still more of them will be coming,” and then he woke up: “Thank God, here she is lying quietly beside me.” Then in his mind he saw clearly a picture of our meeting in Basel in 1867 and the difficulties I had gone through there: “How well it has turned out after all!” he says. Despite this wild bad night he is cheerful, as I should be too, if worry did not ravage me!
At lunch we receive a nephew of Malwida’s whom she has not seen for 28 years, steward to Prince Reuss; he is a very pleasant man, and R., in his eloquent way, describes to him the duties of the aristocracy, the duty of a prince to preserve by association the nation’s ideal possessions. In the evening a small gathering of friends, R. very gay and friendly.