Friday, November 28:
R. growls in my room, while I am taking my lessons, 'What's this? These eternal celebrations!' He has found the Rheingold buttons and is now teasing me in his own peculiar way, only to go around all day with rolled-up sleeves and shower me extravagantly with thanks for the pleasure I gave myself!
Over coffee he says that in Cologne Hans had not wanted to continue playing, since he caught sight of the 'musical Jew' sitting in the front row; our good Lesimple then hit on the idea of turning the piano around, so that Hans could no longer see Herr Hiller. 'Good, now I can play again,' he said when he came on again.
[A sentence based on a German idiom omitted.] R. often comes up to see me, showing off his buttons!
In the evening he reads to us Cervantes's La guarda cuidadosa, exclaiming, 'It is quite inconceivable how he manages to pin down something which looks like a momentary inspiration.' We then go through my father's Tasso, in which R. deplores the long-drawn-out lament at the beginning, the chain rattling and the excessive jubilation at the end.
To conclude this day I must mention a strangely daemonic occurrence at lunch. Just as I was having the Rhine coins melted down to make the buttons, R. showed me his buttons (from the King), which, I feel, were not a very good match, and said, 'You will now probably be giving me some buttons.'
At lunch R. read to us an idea he had jotted down upstairs - that a stranger to our civilization would perhaps feel content with it, but not someone who was rooted in it.
Over coffee, search for Goethe's poem on brooms and boys, also the 'Pustkuchen,' but without success - no proper index!
[Added below this entry: 'Unspecified day. Passing my bust, R. says, "She looks as if she were saying, “And another thing...!”" We talked of Alcibiades, who for all his genius achieved nothing; I say that he ought to have led the campaign against Syracuse all by himself, he would perhaps have been just the man to fight boldly for an unjust cause and then carry a civilizing influence right into Africa; R. says, "For that one needs to be a legitimate prince, like Cyrus or Alexander, so that people look upon one as a superior being." Friday. Friend W. tells us of a new play, Die Hexe [The Witch], which has made a great impact; in it a lady of enlightened views during the Thirty Years' War is struck down by a shot as she tears up the Bible: 'Hence the Hexenschuss [literally, witches' shot; lumbago],' R. says and explains why all this hack playwriting is so absurd in our country, which lacks a social basis.']