Monday, November 25:
R. slept only fairly well, but he works and chides me fondly for also working, saying laughingly, "If Bardolph saved Falstaff so much in torches, you save me just as much in teachers!" I had told him of my pleasure in Freytag, who has written such a good portrait of Luther that I need only read it to the children to feel confident that they will have a proper understanding of the great man.
R.'s dream, which he told me over our afternoon coffee, was that he had been standing with some other people among abysses and ravines, and then in a hall where someone cried out, "The only person who can help us now is a ruler of genius." R. agreed with him, and it seemed that by this means the ravines were to be bridged.
A useless Parisian hat causes us to remark on the impossibility of getting a broad-brimmed hat from France ("All they make is little chignon caps," says R.), and he exclaims, "That is a sign of the barbaric times in which we live, that we get the French to supply our costumes." R. works in the afternoon, while I stroll in the garden beneath the stars after the second dancing lesson, filled with gratitude for my fate!
In the evening we take up Disraeli's Tancred; the beginning strikes us as quite vapid, and R. tells me to skip wherever possible; but the scene between Montacute and his father interests us, and R. says he is looking forward to seeing how the author develops this; summarizing his attitude toward the Jews, he says, "Here at any rate they have been emancipated a generation too soon." Later in the evening R. says to me upstairs, "Today I worked out a monologue on the cello for Kundry's awakening by Gurnemanz." He has started to ink in the first penciled pages.