Wednesday, November 6:
R. had a good night; he dreamed that he was floating in the air; he was in a kind of boardinghouse in Paris, but the company there turned out to be unpleasant, and he floated ironically away. He leaves me with the words “Nulla dies sine linea,” saying this is the way he earns his happiness! [A few words of untranslatable wordplay omitted.]
At lunch he tells the girls they ought to have learned to play stringed instruments, for then we should have had a quartet, and he recalls a Mme. Christiani in a red velvet dress, who played the cello; this memory takes him back to Berlin at the time of the Kientf production, and to a soiree at the home of poor Gaillard to which this lady came wearing a tiara and a velvet dress, carrying her cello; it was quite unsuitable, for the surroundings were so dismal and dreary: “We didn’t even have the money to advertise the piano scores, and it was so cold, everyone so miserable!” The day before he said that with Meyerbeer and Redern he was like the hare between the two hedgehogs!
R. has a slight cold, but he takes a walk. After supper we go through Fernand Cortez on the piano and are truly astonished by the clutter of trivialities, everything really just an excuse for ballet. After that a discussion with friend Wolzogen on the present situation — everyone is too compromised ever to be able to speak the truth about Israel, because the bankers have now become identified with the idea of property, and everyone’s head reels at the thought that he might not be able to turn himself from a poor man into a rich one. That teachers in Prussia are now not to be given a bonus, but instead the second examination is being dispensed with — this makes one shake one’s head and smile sadly. An old party dress which R. once gave me and which I have turned into a dressing gown pleases R. a great deal: it is such a joy to dress myself up for him — how rewarded I feel by his gay appreciation!