Thursday, September 12:
R. slept well. He jokes with me about my “Hussite” friend, with whom I spend a lovely morning walking to the theater and then to the Fantaisie; the feeling I have of being at home when I gaze on these hills, though it is only a short while since I first came here, seems to me to stem from the fact that R. has built his theater here, that our children will live here, that our grave is here.
R. goes out for a while, then he works in ink, then tries out the new, long-desired pencil whose lead, when mixed with water, turns into ink and becomes indelible.
In the evening my Polish friend and the Wolzogens; friend W. always brings along all sorts of sadly comic tales about the German Reich, that, for example, two Protestant churches in Berlin have become insolvent and have been turned into beer halls, in which the vergers are employed as waiters; and that, to encourage the fine arts, a sculptor has been commissioned to make an Alexander studying the map of India. R. thinks this is a dig at Tsar Alexander of Russia, but I tell him these people are not as witty as all that, it is only he who is so inventive. He says laughingly about the critical situation in the East, “I’ll send them my Berlioz, he’ll soon restore order there.” The thoroughly boring evening ends very amusingly, with R., Malwida, and I waxing hysterical over the miseries we endured!