Wednesday, September 11:
R. had quite a good night, getting up only once, around 2 o’clock. He had another bad dream about me: “Minna no longer suffices,” he says, “to wake me up.” He works.
At lunch he talks about Wilhelm Meister, says that in the opening parts it spreads itself out like sunshine breaking through the morning mists. He says he had always wished he could find himself a girl like Philine: “I was a curiously stiff young fellow,” he adds.
In the afternoon he writes to the King, sends him the etching with the remark that he has never looked so bad-tempered in his life, so perhaps he had just looked like that in London! In the evening my Polish friend, whom we call “the Hussite woman,” a fanatical, strange person; R. in his charming way digs up all his memories of Poland. A lot, too, about conditions in Russia; R. says he cannot stand conspiracies. Then he plays the march of the Knights of the Grail. Lovely moonlight.