Monday, September 29:
R. did not have a good night; late rising in consequence, but he is cheerful, thinks of the work we did not complete yesterday and exclaims, “What is life without a lambrequin?”
News from Wiesbaden [telegram enclosed; see notes]; R. replies to Herr Niemann. Around midday he tells me he has finished his letter. Before work he read the first act of Alexander and Darius.
In the afternoon I do some hanging for him, and he is satisfied! When I have finished, he takes me down to the salon and reads to me his moving letter, written with such manly restraint.
Over our afternoon coffee we talk about painting, the representation of the female body, which R. thinks an unsuitable subject, since it too clearly expresses its natural functions; he recalls Titian’s Venus, saying that the relationship of the head to the body can be made to look graceful only through decoration, the serpent’s head, holding out its cornucopia longingly: “But of course the Turk does not see that.”
Herr Jäger comes, bringing news of Vienna; R. finds his visit, like all visits, disturbing, and I laughingly tell him that he took refuge in his silence, which is so stony that one feels one can never break through it. At times, incidentally, I feel his loquacity to be a complete shutting off of himself, a way of keeping everything at bay which might get inside his defenses; very few people understand those turbulent waves of wit, through which I see to the mysterious and fertile depths.
In the evening whist, R., Boni, and I. Recently R. talked about the copying of his score, which is now keeping him occupied during the afternoon and in which the various instruments are so precisely indicated that, as he maintains, another person could write the score by following it!