Thursday, December 2:
R. did not have a good night. He dreamed of a hare which was running as if on air, rushed close to his side, and hid itself there; he looked for me to show it to me, but I had gone.
I had to ask him in the morning whether I might go to fetch Blandine; since he tells me that even a single day’s separation from me makes him gloomy, I give up the idea.
Telegram from Hans, whom I had asked on Lulu’s behalf whether she might see him and at the same time hear the 9th. Bülow’s telegram from Meiningen, in French, states that he finds it impossible to answer at once; he was laid up for several days and is still indisposed. This reply brings R. back to the idea of adopting all the children, which is his wish.
Before this conversation, still in bed, he suddenly laughed and said, “Since someone like Shakespeare sees figures nobody has ever seen before, Polonius, Hamlet, the way people think they will now be able to do likewise!”
He writes to the King. A dense fog makes a walk impossible, but we go for a drive, “drop cards,” and are in high spirits throughout. Once again considered the question of Neumann-Hülsen. R. is still very much against the opera house, and he advises me not to send off a letter which I have already written to the director.
In the evening we finish the letters to Uhlig. Then R. reads to me part of his letter, his reply to the King, who asked him what had been going through his mind in the royal box when he suddenly got up and clutched his brow.
I should find it hard to say why I find myself wrapped in melancholy as the evening comes to an end: the correspondence with Uhlig, also his lines to the King, everything, both the good and the bad, deception as well as truth, reveals life to me in all its melancholy, and I feel that nothing can any longer alleviate this melancholy, not even one’s own personal good spirits.
We talk about La Renaissance. R. says I ought to write about it; what good does it do, he observes, that I talk a lot with others, since nothing but nonsense seems to come of it? We part in deep feelings of harmony.
R. went through parts of Joseph with Lusch and is very pleased with her, her intelligence and her integrity, no less with Fidi, whose way of saying Mass continues to amuse R.
My Parsifal dress gives him pleasure; he says I have never looked so well; in Munich, he says, I suffered too much, and in consequence became shy.