Wednesday, November 19:
R. again had quite a good night. Winter is here with a vengeance. R. continues ruling and finishes the Gutzlaff pamphlet, which he finds very satisfactory and recommends to me to read. After lunch, when we are talking of the upper classes and the little that is to be hoped for from them, R. says the people, the workers, are not a hope, but an obligation.
On the previous evening he spoke of various encounters on the streets, the poor basketmaker, the craftsman’s apprentice, and the authorities’ attitude toward them. Also one hears from all sides of deficits which are to be made good through new taxes, on top of that the news that trichinosis has now broken out in Bayreuth!
In the evening we play whist, and R. is bubbling over with such high spirits that it is bliss to see him; he says he wants to have luck in cards, for he already has luck in love. Over coffee he said to Herr v. St., “Just you wait, I shall found a new religion, chuck all the patrons’ money into it,” and this evening he says, “Whist is only played in convents.” Searching for the origin of the word “Eskadron” [“squadron”], R. sings the praises of Littré, who produced a book such as his dictionary all by himself, whereas “we idle Germans, what have we done?” He again highly recommends the pamphlet of Schopenhauer quotations and at lunch reads us several passages from it, about the ugliness and inferiority of the human race in comparison with the superior nature of animals.
Our army also produces some smiling shakes of the head from R.; he imitates the gesture of the lower ranks toward their commanding officer and says he used often to contrast it favorably with the sloppiness, the cigar-smoking, the indolence of civilian life, but now it seems to him nothing more than barbarism and cretinism.