Tuesday, November 25:
During the night I see R. turning over in bed and hear him exclaim, 'Oh, what a relief!' He then tells me his dream: I had wished to leave him; he could not understand why, tried to recall my features, saying to himself, 'She seemed so well disposed - is it all finished? But the children must stay with me.' Then, imagining himself and the children without me, he started to weep, and that woke him up.
We then talk about Don Quixote's divine fury against the guard, and particularly his discovery that the people were convicts; R. compares himself to him, saying his fury is aroused in much the same way. He rules lines and tells me that he will not be able to allow himself a harp, since I find it a conventional way of expressing sanctity!
I do not know what brought up the subject over coffee; I merely know that R. suddenly quoted Egmont's words, 'I set you an example,' and said this was what made Egmont so significant, this was the German conception of freedom - not to want to go on living when all one could look forward to was fear and the need for circumspection. R. spoke these words with great vehemence, as if he were telling me the basic conviction of his life.
He goes out for a while and in the afternoon writes to friend Levi, refusing his suggestion and consoling him. Levi has also written to me, asking me to use my influence on R. Reminded that he had once before extended a hand to Baron Perfall, R. says: 'I would not think of it. That time when I was forced by the deficit to visit the man, he was so stiff with me - so now they can do what they like. The least little thing one tries to do only causes unpleasantness.'
'I am an anomaly,' R. replies when I point out to him the curious fact that, at the very time he is in effect doing away with the need for theaters, new and very elegant theaters are springing up everywhere.
[Twelve lines dealing with an untranslatable philological point omitted.] In the evening Herr Jäger sings 'Durch die Wälder, durch die Auen' and R. accompanies him so powerfully that Weber's genius exerts its full effect on us. Then, at my request, Herr Rubinstein plays the Prelude to Die Meistersinger and, after that, as a piano duet with R., the 'Kaisermarsch.'
During the Prelude R. kept raising the piano lid for the forte passages and closing it for the piano ones. Before the arrival of our guests he told us inhabitants that there was talk of a closer understanding between Holland and Germany. R. asks jokingly, 'Is Bismarck perhaps having great thoughts?'