Wednesday, September 29:
R. slept well. A book by the younger A. Dumas, sent by my father, brings back to mind a description by the same author of the curious present society within a society. I ask R. if he does not feel that the seeds of a new religion could be planted in such a society (with the prospect of fervent reception), exactly as previously in Corinth. R. says, "But then money would have to be abolished, certain things would have to cease to be obtainable with money, and to that it seems to me the social economists are not paying sufficient attention."
Our landlord visits us and reveals so much hardness and miserliness with regard to his servants that R. is vexed over it all day long. R. writes to friend W. and invites him to Venice. He is cheerful at lunch, but soon afterward he feels tired, indeed in an ill humor, and since I am unable to go out with him on account of a toothache, he says, "Nobody wants anything to do with me." It is cold, and he finds the whistling wind disagreeable.
But in the evening he reads his biography to us. (A letter from Lenbach to Jouk. reveals that the former was in Paris; we wonder what he has been doing there; R. observes that, compared with Italy, Paris is what the bowl of punch was to the Englishman who wished to make himself drunk and tried one bottle of wine after another in vain.)