Thursday, July 15:
R. feels somewhat better, he took a bran bath for his heat blisters and went to sleep in it, had some wild dreams, and now talks about the “unlimited possibilities” of dreams.
He also talks again about the Wittelsbach Foundation and about reprinting Goethe’s letter in the B. Blätter. Yesterday he read to us from the Tagblatt an absurd criticism of Faust, which reminded him of Nietzsche’s “Nähmamsell” [“seamstress”]; after considering the absurdity and unworthiness of such criticisms, he goes on to say, “There is something in what is said about Faust’s unloving attitude; just as one finds it upsetting that Egmont recommends Klärchen to Ferdinand, while she dies for her love; but it is not made to seem offensive, and through it the writer’s truthfulness is particularly emphasized.”
R. is cheerful at lunch; afterward he plays something from the Venusberg music, and when we talk of its beauty, he says: “I have never gone through any experience which could have given me that. Indeed, anyone who has, like your father, what remains for him except disgust and a rosary? And then he comes up with something like the Via crucis. That was sad.” Our conversation also comes to Frau Helbig and her intellectual gifts; he tells us of the circumstances in which he met her and Herr v. Keudell, and how her gifts yielded no results at all for him, he met with nothing but “dead ends.” “From such people one never hears a sigh, a question, and so they can mean nothing to one.” He warns our younger friends against drinking cognac and says it is a bad habit which he himself took up only late in life.
Before lunch he brought me some “Eau de Richard,” his latest perfume concoction, and when I smilingly reflect that, though previously I did not care at all for essence of roses, it has now, through him, become my favorite scent, I find myself wishing that my whole self might be changed in the same way and nothing remain except what he himself has created.
To R.’s great pleasure we go to town with Lusch by streetcar for ice cream; the way we are besieged by beggars irritates R., we ride home feeling tired, and in the evening he is not well. Conversation about comets, Copernicus, and Kepler.