Monday, October 25:
A good night. R. finishes his work. He surprises me around 12 o'clock at Princess Hatzfeldt's, where I am having a late breakfast with Mimi and Count Gobineau. He goes out around 4 o'clock and decides to do this every day, in order to enjoy golden Venice in the sunshine.
While I am seated at my writing desk, he comes to my room, very melancholy; he has been reading a letter from my father and shedding bitter tears at the lack of harmony in it: "On the one side the impulse which led him to write the letter... that is splendid, but then so much conventionality, nothing complete, nothing." We mourn together, and in mourning regain our peace.
In the evening Rub. plays to us very nicely [Beethoven's] Adieu, absence et retour and the Pathétique, in connection with which R. says, "Goethe and Frau v. Stein." Between Beeth.'s first and last works he finds similarities, as in the melodic line, but the works of the middle period seem to him to be in the nature of masterly playing around.