Thursday, January 16:
R. slept well, he laughingly tells me of his dream “while turning over in bed”: “I was between Minna and Mme Wesendonck. She was making horrible advances to me, to annoy Minna, at whom she kept looking. ‘All right, neither of them,’ I thought, and tried to get away, went around looking for a purse, in which there were some gold coins. ‘Is this devilry starting again?’ I said to myself on waking, but I was not driven from my bed.”
He works and says at lunch that he has reached the point where Kundry arouses Parsifal again and he proposes marriage to her. Since the children were at a ball yesterday, R. again tells me how repulsive he, as a young man, found the balls to which his sisters went. In the afternoon R. goes for a walk in the palace gardens, and when he returns, I hand him the (Zurich) stories of G. Keller, which Herr Levi has just sent me. I do not know why, after a cursory glance, I recommend to him the last story in the second volume; when I come downstairs, he says, “I have been spending one of the pleasantest hours of my life.” Everything in the story he has begun he finds gripping, he says. In the evening he reads it to us, and we are truly moved by both melancholy and merriment.
Ursula’s spiritual state is quite shattering, utterly feminine and folk-like.