Wednesday, January 21:
R. slept well and attributes his good nights to the climate here. It is now fine again, though very windy. A visit from the San Carlo theater directors, to whom R., in his expressive French, outlines the damage caused by present-day opera, telling them how Rossini always demanded the best from his singers and how his strictness was feared in Vienna, whereas Meyerbeer ruined it all, for the first time in his life.
In the evening he has once again to resort to this language for Princess Ouroussoff, and he does so quite amiably, although today, when I was glancing through a preface by A. Dumas the younger to a translation of Faust, I swore never again to read a French book.
R. tells us several things from Düntzer's book, and when we talk about the conversation between N[apoleon] and G[oethe] and wonder why we know so little about it, R. says, "Because it was nothing, and certainly not worth reporting." Regarding Nap., he goes on to say that one ought to regard him as a bandit to whom the French Revolution gave tremendous power; his task was to wage war, unlike Fr. the Great, for instance, who was a man of culture and resorted to war only under pressure in an emergency.
We are alarmed by Siegfried's health; jokingly, but concerned, R. says to him, "You look like a cretin, goodhearted, but monstrous!" (Here a sentence in parentheses has been obliterated in ink by an unknown hand.) It turns out that he has boils again. Dr. Schr. prescribes a great many medicines. He also examines R. thoroughly and says he is like a young man.