Friday, June 18:
R. had a good night’s rest, and he takes his walk in the morning. I go to him at 11 o’clock, and he dictates six pages to me, which include the splendid passage about the Last Judgment. In connection with a book by Daudet, R. says: “The people in Paris all imagine that the entire world worries about them; they think, for example, that I have always borne an aigreur [resentment] against Paris because I have never had a success there! The best thing would be not to worry about them at all, except that the rest of the world is far too wretched to be able to provide clothes and perfumes for itself.”
When I went to him for the dictation, he read to me part of a letter by Goethe about the vulgarity of people, with whom one must just put up patiently, since it is customary to wish to tease and vex others. Also the comparison with cretins at the end. Great delight in it.
In the evening he sings Beethoven’s Gellert songs for Lusch, who asked him for them, and, seeing us moved, he says, “That is Protestantism.” Before that he played the end of the Battle Symphony and said, “Extraordinary, they had such noses for what was popular; nobody could think up such a thing nowadays.”
Evening on the terrace by moonlight, all of us with indescribable feelings of well-being. Though I have to lie flat on account of a backache, I enjoy it, too, and above all the happy atmosphere around me! R. moves me indoors to hear the songs, turns me around so that I can see the loveliest view, and his joy in this blissful evening is the blessed outcome of all these rays. R. feels it is only here that one could always find so many new sources of delight; on one of the lakes in northern Italy, for example, everything would probably come in time to seem monotonous.